Just a bar owner

It had taken Harvey fifteen years to return to his twin sister’s resting place. The last time he had stood there, he was twenty-seven, still with estranged wife Sol, still running from his sister’s death. That day, he had buried his mother beside Meredith in the family plot, his own place waiting beside the freshly turned soil where four men had lowered the casket.

His mother had died at forty-nine from heartbreak and solitude. Her life had unraveled in losses: first her daughter, dead at seventeen, making her a bereaved mother before she turned forty. Then her husband, who could not handle his own grief and left without a word after fifteen years of marriage. And finally her son — her only remaining family — who moved to another country and barely saw her two or three times before she passed. Rarely a phone call, even less a visit. 

Now Harvey was forty-two, nearly forty-three, his life also a heap of losses. He wasn’t sure he would outlive her.

Fifteen years was a long time, so Harvey spent half an hour wandering among the graves, looking for two names: Meredith Aline Harvey and Jenna Palomino. The first sight of their resting place was heartbreaking: the stones were dirty, buried in dead leaves and what he was certain was the bouquet he had left there after his mother’s funeral. He wondered for a moment if no one ever maintained the gravestones, only to realize that the whole cemetery looked like a dump. 

Kneeling down, he brushed the dirt from the graves before gently leaving two new bouquets of flowers — white daisies for Meredith, white lilies for his mother. He then sat down on the ground between both graves, legs crossed, and closed his eyes. 

“I don’t know if you can hear me,” he said, almost whispering. “I’m sorry it took me a while to come back.” 

Harvey sat there in silence for what seemed like hours. 

“I don’t know how death works. If you still exist somewhere. Or if you are tied to this place, so you don’t really know anything about what life has been like for the past twenty five years. Or maybe I’m talking to myself right now and you don’t really exist anymore. Maybe Camus has been right all along and it really doesn’t matter. I don’t fucking know. But life has been shit since you left, Mer. Sol and I are no longer together. I run a dive bar in Worm Row that would make mom die a second time…” A pause, before adding “Sorry, mom.” He chuckled sadly, before continuing, “I’m raising a kid that’s not mine. She’s August's. He fucking left town…” 

More silence. Tears fell down his cheeks and he wiped them away fast, as if trying to hide the fact that he was crying. 

“I just need to know that everything is fine afterwards… You know, dying. That it’s not that bad.” 

Harvey waited in silence for a response but he could hear nothing but the wind. He wiped the remaining tears from his face before pushing himself off the ground. 

“I love you both,” he said as a sort of good-bye before walking towards the exit. It was already dark when he reached his car and sat down in the driver’s seat. Harvey pulled out a letter written by Meredith he had found a few months back and re-read it. He sighed before turning on the car and driving towards The Wormhole. 

As he drove, he thought about his own death and decided that it meant nothing more than his life did. Meredith had been dead for twenty five years and life had continued. Wicked’s Rest was still standing. The town was still pulsating with life, people still laughed and fell in love, bars still filled at night, children still cried for their mothers. The sun still rose every morning over a world that had forgotten she had been alive once. 

Harvey was certain he would also be forgotten. He realized then that maybe that was what death was really about: the slow and inevitable erasure of a person from the world, until all that remained were old photographs, maybe some letters, a name carved into a dirty stone. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel as he came to terms with the fact that Meredith only continued to exist because he remembered her. She would inevitably cease to do so once he died. And that would also happen someday to him too.