When my parents passed four years ago, my sister and I inherited their home as well as the resulting mortgage and debt associated with it. My parents weren’t planners—the one and only negative thing I could ever say about them. I knew they weren’t wealthy, but their lifestyle was. I never stopped to wonder where the money came from.
After they passed, we found out they had taken out a second mortgage on their home to pay for their trip to Europe. That trip had been their last. As they’d crashed on one of Italy’s most dangerous roads.
If I could have talked them out of their last lavish trip, they’d still be here. Millie and I wouldn’t be stuck with a house we will be paying off for the next thirty years. And I wouldn’t have used Maddie as a distraction from my stress.
Everything would be better.
When the credit card bills started coming, I nearly had a heart attack, and the gloom of missing my parents was overshadowed by the hurt I felt toward them. How could they leave us in such a mess?
I wish they would have told me. I could have helped them diversify their assets and invest. But they also weren’t the kind of people to sit around working for fifty years, waiting to take that vacation when they retired. They lived for the now. And in a way, I admire them for doing so.
I used to be more like them, but then the accident happened. After that, I sobered up real quick. It was right around the same time my occasional teasing of Maddie turned into an everyday necessity. An addiction.
Millie says it’s common for children to act out after they’ve been through trauma. But it’s hard to take her outlandish opinions on my mental health seriously when she once spent a whole month sleeping upside-down in her bed with her feet in the air. She claimed it helped her mental clarity.
I tried it once. It didn’t do anything except give me two lead legs thirty minutes after I fell asleep and made me dream I got swallowed up by quicksand.
My body shudders remembering the sensation.
Trying to relax is having the opposite effect. Restless energy pulses through me. I need something else. Only a few people are still left in the office, and though Bri will spread rumors that I’m not taking my job seriously, I simply can’t be here anymore.
I wrench off my tie on the way to my truck and let my subconscious autopilot take me where it always does.
The cemetery is empty tonight, and I welcome the quiet. I don’t have to watch where I’m going to find my way to my parent’s graves. My feet know the way down this path after having traveled it for the last four years.
I was in my first weeks of law school when they died.
Overnight I went from a man with a family to a man with a sister. I’m grateful to have her, I know many don’t have such a luxury, but at times I just feel lonely. Like I can’t get back what I’ve been missing no matter how hard I try. The house is too big, too empty, too daunting. I can’t find the peace that used to exist within its walls.
I stop at my parent’s shared headstone.
“I’m stressed, Mom.” My mom always understood me. She said I was like one of those little wind-up cars, always in motion, too afraid to stop until I crashed into something.
I think that’s what I’ve been doing since they’ve been gone—just moving with no real purpose.
“And I don’t think my plan with Maddie is working. I told myself I’d make it right, but I can’t seem to fix it. I can’t fix anything. Not the debt, not my own life.”
I know what my mom would say if she were here, what she always used to say.
“Stop worrying about what you can’t control. Things are going to work out the way they were always meant to. Live your life, darling.”
My mom was a big believer in fate. That everything happened for a reason.
I think I’ve been giving fate a run for its money lately.
“Do you think they can hear you?”
I jump at the small voice to my left. A boy, about ten, has joined me. Well, not me. He’s standing in front of a freshly placed temporary plaque. I can’t make out much except the wordmother. The air is knocked from my lungs like someone socked me in the gut. My chest aches for him.
“I’d like to think so,” I say thoughtfully. “It makes me happy imagining them stuck there listening to me talk about whatever I want.”
He thinks about it, then a hint of a smile makes its way to his lips before it disappears. “My mom used to talk a lot.”
I nod. “Mine too.”
“It’s so quiet now,” he says. He plops on the ground and pushes the unruly blond curls out of his eyes, but they jump right back. I study the child, his dirty face and bruised knees. Does he have someone at home to clean him up and give him a hug at the end of a long day?
He’s much younger than I was when I lost my parents and no doubt he’s felt it in ways I didn’t experience. But no one can fill the void left by a loss that great.
