#natalia dollenmeyer

Buck texts her on a Saturday to ask if she wants to meet for coffee.

She's blindsided, of course, because they haven't spoken for over a year but she's curious so she says yes. He looks terrible when she sees him, like all of that resurrection-light that was in his eyes after he came back from the dead has up and guttered out, leaving a dark emptiness in its wake. They make small talk, catch up on life and then work. He asks about her job, and she asks about his, and doesn't really notice that he doesn't answer the question until his breath hitches when he looks somewhere over her shoulder. It's a man, older, maybe mid 50s to early 60s. He's vaguely familiar, she guesses, with one of those faces that just skirts the edge of her memory. But then he's gone into the coffeeshop and she doesn't think anything more about him. Buck, though... he's still staring at the place the man was.

She reaches out across the table and touches his hand. He visibly startles like he forgot she was there.

"Hey." She tilts her head to meet his gaze. "Not that I don't love coffee as much as the next girl, but are you okay? Seriously."

He blinks slowly, eyelashes damp. "Bobby died."

He says the name with enough gravitas and weight that she thinks she's supposed to know who that is, but she doesn't. She never spent enough time with his family to be able to commit them to memory. She knows the word died, and suddenly a whole lot of things click into place.

"Buck."

"I'm sorry," he says. "I shouldn't—I really did want to catch up with you, but then I saw that man and he looked—he looked just like him and—"

That man. The older gentleman.

And then she remembers who Bobby is clearly, Buck's father in every way but blood. The man who raised him, and shaped him, who knew him down to the marrow and molecules and everything in between.

He's shaking underneath her hand, a fine tremor that rattles through his entire body. She wonders if he even notices how precarious the thread he's hanging on by really is, one small nudge and he'll come crashing to the ground like a puppet with cut strings.

She clears her throat and slips into work mode between one moment and the next.

"When?"

"Two weeks ago. It's been on the news."

Two weeks. Still fresh, then. He looks almost offended that she doesn't know already, which makes a sort of sense, she supposes. The 118 is famous around these parts, even for people who don't work in response. She's seen the subreddits and the tumblr pages and 118-inspired amateur porn on Twitter in the LAFD tag. Which is to say that she should know, probably. But she doesn't watch the news, she doesn't keep up with social media. She sees enough death during her day job than to want to go home and turn on the television and be greeted by another act of violent misogyny, another genocide, another war.

Even she has to turn it off sometimes.

She stares down at the table, thinking, his hand still trapped and trembling underneath hers. "You know, there's this thing people say when someone dies: I'm sorry for your loss. We always shorten it to I'm sorry and hope the idea still comes across. But I've never really liked that much. It's well-meaning until you really sit with the idea of apology, of saying I'm sorry for the inevitable."

"What do you mean?" His voice sounds painfully small.

"I mean, when we're taught to apologize as children, it's always within the context of wrongdoing. Something has gone wrong. We've hurt someone, either through accident or intent. So our ingrained response to wrongness is an apology. But that just means that, when someone dies and we say we're sorry for it, we are associating death with something bad; and something that, more importantly, could have been avoided. But that's not true.

Death is the only thing we can count on in life. No matter what journey you take to end up on death's door, whether suicide or murder or cancer, the act of dying is morally neutral. It's not a flaw. It's not a failure. It's not an accident. It's not intentional. It is one of the only naturally unfolding things in the entire world. Yes, it feels bad for those of us who are left behind. It feels horrendous, actually. But the way we frame it, with an apology and a hope that gets better, like there was something that could have changed the outcome if we'd only been a little bit smarter, done a little bit more, is a cruelty we deal to ourselves and to each other."

There's a memory knocking at the doors of her brain—her grandma's frail, cold hand in hers while her relatives and the EMTs bustled around her. Strange, fleeting hands on her small shoulders saying sorry for a loss she had nothing to do with; the fear and guilt that if she'd checked on her grandma that night instead of falling asleep on the sofa, she would have been able to spot the symptoms of the heart attack before it took her away. But those memories are best left untouched for now.

Natalia watches him carefully. "Your journey is going to look at lot different from here. Your life, all the moments you thought you would have him for, are not going to happen and you will grieve him multiple times for the rest of your life. But that's not different from anything else in life, right? You make a wrong turn and the GPS recalculates. You pursue a different career than the one you studied for and hope for the best. You move out of your home state and pray you're making the right decision. You say yes to a date with someone who will either be the best choice you've ever made or the worst. Every moment that passes, every decision we make is a course correction, a change from where we began until we get to our destination. That's all death is. Why would I, why would anyone be sorry about that?"

"But he should be here. His wife needs him here. His son and daughter need him here. I need him here." His tears do start to fall then, though he doesn't sob. He doesn't stop staring at her face, waiting, wordlessly begging her to give him answers she's not entirely sure she has. "We need him back."

Her voice is soft when she says, "But you can't have him."

It's just five words. They shouldn't hurt as deeply as they do, but they do. Every time. She's given the same version of this speech to so many people she wouldn't even begin to know how to count them all, but each time, these words steal something from someone. She watches the way they land now, each emotion rippling out across Buck's face: grief, anger, despair, loss, love, all wrapped in one, tragic image.

"Every choice Bobby made, every single one, was a course correction that led him to his destination," she says with that same soft voice. "Maybe it was too soon. Maybe it wasn't. But he's there now and you've parted ways. I told you I don't like saying I'm sorry when someone dies, but you know what I do say?" He shakes his head and she squeezes his hand and meets his gaze. "I say thank you. Thank you for sharing your journey with me. Thank you for all the times we got lost together, for all the arguments, for all the large and small ways we found each other, healed each other, rebuilt each other. Thank you for the memories. Thank you for such a unique and irreplaceable love. Because that's what it is, right? No one will ever love you the way Bobby loved you, which hurts now, but god, Buck. What a beautiful imprint to leave on someone's life."

His voice is watery and miserable, his face damp as his tears fall in earnest. He shakes his head. "I don't know how to do this."

"No one does. But we try. Every day, we try just a little bit more and eventually we stumble our way into something like healing."

"The car starts moving again."

Her mouth turns up into a small smile. Her grandmother's smile, her aunt always used to say. You're damn near the spitting image of her.

"Yeah," she says, and she's proud of the way her voice doesn't crack. "The car starts again."

Buck nods. He's silent for a long time as he wipes his face and gets his bearings. Eventually he extracts his hand from underneath hers.

"Sorry," he says after a while. "I didn't mean to get all..." he waves a hand as his voice trails off.

Natalia shrugs. "It's what I'm here for."

"I owe you another coffee, one with less emotion attached to it, but I do have to run. I promised May—Bobby's daughter—I'd help her pack her apartment." He pauses a beat. "She's moving back in with her mom."

Ah.

His face darkens with grief and Natalia lets him have his moment before she shakes her head and waves him off.

"Go do what you have to do. I'm just a phone call away. You know that."

They say their goodbyes and Natalia watches him jog to his car, then watches him pull out and continues to stare at the empty parking space for a long time. She twists the ring on her right ring finger, the gold polished and smooth, in just as good condition as it was the day her granddad proposed to her grandmother with it and lets her grief spill through her body.

This is a well-worn routine they have by now.

She breathes through the pain, through the loss and the memories until the phantom hands on her shoulders disappear and sound of the flatline fades.

In her mind, she says thank you. Thank you for the journey, Gram. It was lovely, and imagines she can hear her beautiful, warm voice saying it back.

Abby

"You are my ghost story, Abby. You are the amazing spirit that blew into my life, turned it upside down, and then vanished into the night. Being with you made me a better man, and for that I will always love you. Now it's time for me to figure out who I am without you." (2x07)

Hear me out

we keep missing each other