Reading Time:
She was crying the first time she met him. A bunch of camellias clutched in her trembling hands, hair plastered to her forehead with rain, and grief clouding her heart. Mud coated her knees. The flowers were placed against the headstone, crowding the others she had brought earlier that week.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured as tears gathered on her chin and fell. “I’m so sorry.”
She felt more than saw another person beside her.
It was a guy in a hoodie and jeans, an umbrella shielding him from the worst of the downpour. He held a ceramic elephant in his hand, which he placed at the base of the headstone to her left, and she heard murmured words. A prayer. She glanced at the date engraved in the stone, swallowing when she realized it was exactly the same as the one she had been staring at for weeks.
November 7.
His toes shifted toward her, and he asked, “Who were they to you?”
She sniffled, wiping her nose with her jacket sleeve. “My sister.”
“How?”
A simple question, but one that renewed her muffled sobs, lights flashing in the backs of her eyelids and tires screeching and —
“Car accident,” she replied, voice breaking. “You?”
“My brother,” he said, and she saw his hand curl into a fist. “Cancer.”
“I’m sorry.” She hated the words, hated how empty and useless they were, but she had nothing else to offer.
He sighed, the breath long and laced with the kind of exhaustion she recognized as her own. “I’m sorry, too.”
They remained that way for a while, mourning their loved ones, until she rose to her feet, wiped away the worst of the mud, and left.
On a sunny December day, he was already there as she ascended the grassy hill. Another ceramic elephant had joined the first one. She set down the carnations, gathering the wilted stems of the old flowers to dispose of them on her way out.
It wasn’t raining this time. They both sat facing the headstones, and for the first time in a while, her breaths came easier.
In March, she wasn’t surprised to hear his careful footsteps approach as she arranged the tulips.
They always visited on the seventh day of the month. She had never seen anyone else visit his brother’s grave, but then again, there was nobody else to visit her sister’s.
By August, they arrived in the parking lot at the same time. She had purchased a ceramic elephant she saw in a store window a few days prior, and they shared a laugh at the way each trunk was fitted with its own Christmas stocking. He had two bouquets of dahlias with him, one for her sister, the other for her.
Many years later, when an army of ceramic elephants and dried flowers graced the two headstones every November 7, they remembered all they had lost, and were grateful for all they had gained. Never again would they have to grieve alone.
Clara Abigail 