What We Bear

Six months after the funeral, the vitamins still sat on her nightstand—orange and white cylinders arranged with clinical precision. She'd been taking them religiously for the cancer that wasn't supposed to come back, the supplements that were supposed to fortify her against a body that had already betrayed her twice. I couldn't bring myself to throw them away. That felt like admitting she wasn't coming back to finish the bottle.

The dog, old and achingly patient, had taken to sleeping on her pillow instead of mine. At night I'd feel the mattress dip as he climbed up, the weight of him pressing against my back, his breathing syncing with mine. Some mornings I woke with his fur in my mouth and the terrible realization that I was grateful not to be alone. He looked at me with those knowing eyes that said: I know she's gone too. We're just two ghosts haunting this house now.

"You have to bear it," she'd told me during those last weeks, when the pain medication made her lucid in bursts. "People think grief is a wave that crashes and recedes. It's not. It's a weight you learn to carry until it becomes part of your skeleton."

She'd been right. The weight of her absence had settled into my bones. I moved through rooms like a diver underwater, everything slowed and muffled. I walked the dog past the hospital where she'd died. I bought groceries for one. I called her sister and made small talk about weather and work, astonished at how easily the words came, as if my mouth remembered how to form sentences even while my heart had forgotten how to beat properly.

Tonight, I finally opened the vitamin bottle. The capsules rattled—leftovers from a life interrupted. I swallowed one dry, standing in the kitchen with only the dog watching. It didn't taste like anything. It didn't fix anything. But as it slid down my throat, something in my chest loosened, just a fraction. The bear of it—this weight she'd warned me about—suddenly seemed bearable for the first time.

The dog pressed his warm flank against my leg, and together we stood in the quiet kitchen, learning how to stay.