In the summer of 2018, my then-wife and I spent a weekend in the beautiful “village” of Alfama. We rented what I can only describe as a cavern of a studio in what would become my most favorite part of the city. The apartamento was ridiculously small, with only one window and a bed pushed into a cave-like opening against the wall. It was tight and hot and absolutely perfect.
The war went on. After each battle, the casualties were laid side by side beside the pit. Their handlers, the men who had fetched them from the field and medic’s station, rested on the mound of dirt exhumed from the pit, smoking cigarettes, choking on stale biscuits. Sewn inside their canvas coffins, the casualties looked like a regiment of bedrolls.
When we woke up, everywhere we looked, parachutes. Pierced on church steeples, crumpled in meadows. Cast over roof gutters and laid bristling against treetops. They sagged from branches like the carcasses of ghosts.
Grief, at its heart, is a question.
What could I have done differently?
Why why why why why why why why why why why?
At Christmas, am I still supposed to cook the carrots with horseradish that no one else eats?
Or, rather, grief is many questions tumbling on top of one another.
The leak started when they were sitting on the couch: Frank reading the paper, Martha knitting, the radio playing a song they had danced to once, though neither could quite remember where. The ceiling opened and spilled right onto the cushion between them, and they turned to watch it pour.
If the world ends in fire, my family will survive. Here’s the truth: after the house burned down, I was restless for twenty moons and filled with more shame than the prosecuted. The guilt was too massive for my eleven-year-old body to carry, but I stored it in the pit of my stomach for five years.
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