I Went to Maine to Bury One Grief and Came Home Carrying Another

I Went to Maine to Bury One Grief and Came Home Carrying Another

I’ve been putting off writing, and I’m not entirely sure why.

Actually, that’s not true. I know why. Every time I start thinking about what I want to write, my brain quietly suggests dissociation instead. Very helpful. Great system. No notes.

So today I made myself a mimosa with fresh tangerine juice and forced myself to sit down at the keyboard. Whether this becomes anything, who the hell knows. But apparently something in me wants out, even if it keeps hiding behind laundry, Walmart orders, dogs, and whatever is on the stove.

June’s funeral was a few weeks ago, even though she died last November, right after Thanksgiving. Because she and my dad have a burial plot in Maine with June’s family, we had to wait until spring. The ground is too frozen there for burials in winter, which makes sense practically and feels insane emotionally.

It made her death a slow burn. She was gone, but the funeral still wasn’t really behind us. More like funeral number one was behind us, and funeral number two was waiting patiently in Maine like grief with a calendar invite.

I was happy to honor her wishes. I would do the same for my dad, Patrick, my sister, or anyone who trusted me with that kind of responsibility. But it was rough. On all of us, I think.

For months, I have been a ball of emotion, exhaustion, distraction, and whatever the technical term is for “I’m fine as long as I don’t sit still long enough to know I’m not fine.”

A few months ago, I read The Alchemist, and the question that stuck with me was: what is my heart saying?

Annoying question, honestly.

Because my heart has been saying a lot. Loudly. Rudely. Repeatedly.

It is saying I do not want to work anymore. It is saying I am tired of being an executive assistant. It is saying I am tired of commuting. It is saying I am very tired of getting up in the morning, although whether that is spiritual exhaustion, Epstein-Barr, poor CPAP compliance, or simply being a middle-aged woman expected to keep functioning like a corporate appliance is still under review.

My job is honestly lovely, which makes the whole thing more irritating. I work for a huge company with kind people, excellent benefits, real perks, and bosses who are decent human beings. My workday is seven hours, which is something I had never experienced in over thirty years of working. They give us lunch money. Snacks. Bonuses. Healthcare on site. Bloodwork without leaving the building. The whole civilized adult employment package.

And still, my heart says: I do not want to fucking do this anymore.

The commute is a huge part of it. Three days a week, I leave my house at 6:30 in the morning and get home around 6 at night. Drive to the ferry. Ride the ferry. Walk to the office. Reverse the whole thing at the end of the day. By the third 5 a.m. morning in a row, I am seriously considering quitting, joining a monastery, or becoming a dog walker, despite the fact that one of my own dogs recently snapped a six-foot leather leash in half.

Diana, for the record, remains insane. She is beautiful, strong, reactive, exhausting, and apparently powered by whatever they put in illegal fireworks. Trainer number three is the best one yet, but even the best trainer cannot magically make a crackhead German Shepherd ignore another dog when her entire nervous system has decided that today is the day she must scream at the world. Last week Patrick was walking her and she pulled so hard she snapped a six-foot leather leash in half. Thankfully, she didn’t hurt the other dog, but it scared me. It also confirmed what I already know, which is that we need a yard, or I need to stop working, or both. Preferably both.

So yes, my heart has been saying a lot.

But under all of that, something older was speaking. I just didn’t know it until I stood in that cemetery.

Before the trip to Maine, Uncle Paul had fallen. Then he was in the hospital. Then rehab. Then back to the hospital with pneumonia. Kara and I were already worried because the last time we saw him, he was frail. Too frail. The kind of frail that makes every illness feel less like an illness and more like a negotiation.

So we were carrying that, too, when we went to Maine for June’s burial. Family does not usually give you one grief at a time. It stacks them. Efficiently. Like Tupperware.

We went to bury June, but she was not the only person in that cemetery.

Paul’s mother, my Aunt Gloria, was my mother’s sister. Near her grave was Paul’s.

My cousin Paul.

Paul was very special to me when I was young. We were cousins close in age, and I remember having deep conversations with him about life. Not kid conversations. Not surface conversations. The kind of conversations you remember decades later because someone saw you clearly for a few minutes, and that kind of thing matters when you are young and trying to figure out who you are.

He was nineteen when he died.

He was a cadet at Maine Maritime Academy, away on the State of Maine training cruise, docked in Funchal, Madeira. For most of my life, I knew the outline of the story, or what I thought was the outline. There had been trouble. A brawl. A nightclub. Something overseas. Something terrible. Paul died.

That was the family version in fragments.

Then I saw his grave, and suddenly fragments were not enough.

I wanted to know what the hell happened.

So I did what I do when my nervous system has no interest in peace. I researched. I found old articles, U.S. articles, Portuguese articles, clippings that repeated each other, and clippings that contradicted each other. I found official language that made everything sound smaller than it was.

A brawl. A melee. An incident.

Those words bothered me because they made his death sound mutual. Messy, yes, but mutual. Like everyone involved was equally responsible for the chaos. Like Paul was simply one more body in a violent night, one more participant in something that got out of hand.

But the more I read, the less that seemed true. There had been an earlier incident at a club involving other cadets. Some were refused entry. There was drinking, anger, damage, some kind of confrontation. Locals were furious. But Paul seemed to have been trying to get back to the ship when the worst thing happened to him.

And there was a woman with him.

The articles gave her name. She was a cadet, too. She was in the taxi with him when a group of angry locals approached. I kept looking at her name and thinking, she knows something no article can tell me. Not because she had all the answers, but because she had been there. She had been inside the night before it became a headline.

For weeks, I tried to find her gently, carefully, without barging into her life like a grief detective with bad boundaries. Eventually, I found someone who seemed likely to be her. I sent a short message. I expected nothing.

She answered, and then she wanted to talk.

I’ll call her Carol.

And she was lovely. Not fake lovely. Not polite lovely. Truly lovely. The kind of person who answers a stranger because she understands that some questions do not go away just because forty years have passed.

She told me she had just met Paul that day.

Somehow, that made it worse and better at the same time. Worse because she had been pulled into the worst night of his life almost by chance. Better because it meant there was still room, before the horror, for an ordinary beginning.

Her female cadet friend had introduced them. The cadets had the day off, and Carol and her friend had gone sightseeing. They tried to rent a scooter or a moped but couldn’t find a place to do it, so one of the locals lent them a scooter.

That detail stopped me.

In the middle of this story that ends in water and terror, there was a borrowed scooter. Two young women riding around Madeira in the sun, stopping at bars, looking at the scenery, having the kind of day that probably felt like freedom.

They went back to the ship, changed, and headed out again. That was when Carol’s friend introduced her to Paul.

They all went out together.

Carol said she and Paul were sitting outside the nightclub drinking blue curaçao drinks. She did not know what happened inside. She had been drinking in the sun all day. Paul disappeared for a short time and then came back. She didn’t know where he had gone.

Then they left and went to another club.

Later, when they headed back to the dock, they got into a taxi. That is when the group came.

Carol told me she remembers that after they took Paul out of the taxi, the taxi continued all the way to the boat with her.

I keep thinking about that ride back. She was young. She had been drinking for hours. She was in shock. She had just watched something happen that her brain could not process. And then she was delivered back to the ship without him.

When the crew asked where Paul was, she said she didn’t know. At first, she was trying to protect him. She thought they were in trouble for being out. She thought maybe if she said less, she was helping.

But everyone else was already back on the ship. Everyone except the two of them. The crew knew locals were looking for retribution. They knew something was wrong.

After some prodding, she told them what happened. She told them Paul had been grabbed.

And then they found him.

The articles say different things. Fell. Was pushed. Drowned after a beating. Pursued. Attacked by four or five individuals. Found by divers from the ship.

There are so many versions of violence after it happens. So many ways for language to step around the body.

But the part I keep coming back to is what happened afterward.

She was not allowed to talk to the press. She was not allowed to go to the funeral. But a few months later, my Aunt Gloria asked to see her.

So Carol went.

I cannot stop thinking about that meeting. A mother whose nineteen-year-old son died in another country, sitting across from the young woman who had been with him in his last hours.

There are so many ways that could have gone.

Aunt Gloria could have needed someone to blame. She could have asked impossible questions. She could have handed Carol a burden no young woman should have had to carry.

But she didn’t.

She told Carol it was not her fault. She told her not to let it affect her life. She told her Paul would not have wanted that. She told her to go on and live a great life because that would make Paul happy.

That is grace in the truest sense of the word. Not easy grace. Not soft greeting-card grace. The kind of grace that costs something. The kind that comes from a mother standing in the wreckage of her own life and choosing not to pass that wreckage to someone else.

They exchanged Christmas cards for a while.

Carol finished school. Then more school. She got married. She lived her life. And for many years, she lived in New Jersey, about ten miles from me.

Ten miles.

All that time, this woman who carried part of Paul’s last night was living just down the road. I drove through towns near her. Worked near her. Ate near her. Lived my life near her, never knowing.

Maybe things happen when they are supposed to.

I don’t know if I believe that entirely. Sometimes I think things happen because life is strange and cruel and occasionally generous by accident.

But I do know this: I went to Maine to bury one grief, and came home carrying another.

Except now I am carrying it differently.

Before, Paul’s death was a family story made out of fragments. A grave. A name. A terrible thing that happened far away. Now there are blue drinks and a borrowed scooter and a girl who liked him. There is a taxi ride back to the ship. There is a mother who met the survivor and chose mercy.

There is still no clean answer. Maybe there never will be.

But there is more of him now than there was before.

And maybe that is what my heart was saying all along. Not just quit your job. Not just move. Not just get a yard before Diana kills us all. Maybe underneath all that noise, my heart was saying there was someone here who had been flattened by the telling. Someone who became a word too small to hold him. Someone I had loved, and lost, and somehow lost again by not knowing enough.

So I went looking.

I found Carol.

And through her, I found a little more of Paul.

I don’t think I’m finished

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