Bear Witness to the Ending

The funeral was her idea. Of course it was. Sarah always insisted on proper closure, even for a goldfish.

"He was with us through everything, David. The promotion, the miscarriage, when you lost your job. We can't just flush him."

So there I stood in a black suit that smelled of mothballs and desperation, my fedora pulled low against the gray Seattle drizzle. The hat had been my father's, and I looked ridiculous wearing it, but Sarah said I needed to look dignified. Dignified. I felt like a zombie going through the motions of a life I'd stopped living years ago.

Our neighbor, Mrs. Chen, watched from her window with the intensity of a spy. She'd been watching us since the incident last spring, when the police came because someone reported screaming. That was just Sarah and me fighting about whether to have another child. We'd screamed until our voices gave out, then sat in silence on the kitchen floor, holding hands like drowning survivors.

"You remember when we bought Bubbles?" Sarah asked, her voice thick with unspilled tears. "That pet store in the mall, where you won me that stuffed bear from the claw machine? You spent twenty dollars and refused to leave until you got it."

I nodded. I remembered. I remembered everything. The bear sat on our bed, its glass eye watching us through arguments and whispered apologies, through nights when we touched each other with desperate tenderness and mornings when we couldn't look each other in the eye.

"He lived five years," I said. "That's something."

"Everything dies, David. Everything." She turned to me, and for the first time in months, really looked at me. "Even us, if we're not careful."

I reached for her hand, the way I used to. She didn't pull away. The rain fell harder now, washing over the small grave we'd dug in the backyard, over the goldfish who'd outlasted our marriage's best days. Mrs. Chen's curtain fell back into place.

"Come inside," I said. "I'll make tea."

Sarah nodded, and we walked toward the house together, two people learning again how to be alive, bearing witness to each other's slow return from the dead.