All We Leave Behind

Trigger warning: death

Frost hung in the air and draped over branches like stringy cobwebs. Through the naked trees, ember streaked over the powder blue sky, and feathery clouds blotted across the canopy. The first snowfall came through the night, which coated the tops of the graves with blankets of white. It dusted icing sugar over the stones.  

In the distance, a commuter train rattled over the tracks, towards the heart of London. Naomi would be on the train in an hour’s time, sandwiched between schoolchildren making their way to the town over and people in suits, their satchels tucked between their knees or feet.

She would be one of them, her headphones tucked over her ears, her laptop bag behind her calves. Anonymous. As unknown as she was in this graveyard, the only living human in a mile radius.

           The sun had not yet peeked above the horizon, through the evergreen trees in the distance, but the dim glow of intermittent streetlamps exposed her.

She sat in the middle of the mounds, her back propped against a cold stone. She hugged her arms to her chest, black coat drawn tight to her shoulders, and pursed her mouth around the lip of a coffee.

She only came to the cemetery at this time. Somehow, the weight of her burden became too much when others were around to observe her grief. She didn’t cry so much anymore – only on special occasions, like the anniversary or her birthday – but still. It was all so public.

Snow bled through her trousers and the chill soaked her face. The downside to coming to the graveyard so early was how bitingly cold the air was through the winter. Also, the darkness. Around New Year, she would arrive in pitch black, only leaving as the sky paled a shade.

The bright side, however, was that it early enough that she could make her way home before work. She liked to shower after going to the cemetery. She worried that the tang of her sadness would be too obvious otherwise.

A breeze nipped her cheeks, and she tucked her face down into the scruff of her coat, eyes fixed on the grave ahead of her. It read: Suzanna Louise Green. 1941-2021. A loving mother, grandmother, and wife.

A gravestone can tell someone so much and so little about a person. After all, there was only so much space to condense a whole life. There was a real bargaining, a real consideration of what role that person was defined by. A long and emotional conversation between the family members.  

Or, in the case of her family, a poorly worded text that Naomi didn’t dignify with a response and a promise to go out for dinner at some point, which they never did.

She didn’t mind looking at Suzanna’s grave. She had conjured a life forever in her head over the course of many mornings. She imagined Suzanna as the archetypal grandmother. Whenever she entered a room, the balm of cookies would peel after her, and she would pinch the cheek of her grandson, who had bright pink cheeks and buttery hair, sticky fingers that reached for the apple slices she cut up for him.

One thing that Naomi did not dispute was that Suzanna was a woman who was loved, a woman who deserved fresh lilies on her grave on the third of every month. Naomi couldn’t afford flowers, and her grandmother didn’t visit often. The only people left to mourn.

She wondered what people thought when they read the gravestone Naomi leaned her back against. Emma Sloane. 1979-2022. Gone but not forgotten. That was the result of the text.

The text wasn’t entirely her grandmother’s fault. Naomi had disappeared for a month after the funeral. She took a month off work and flew out to Greece under the guise of ‘healing’. It didn’t make the pain any lighter. She often thought about whether she might not have to visit the grave every day if she had just stuck around after the funeral, stayed here for her grandmother. Whether it was the guilt that caused her to be paused in stasis.

She heaved a low, trembling sigh, and steam rose from her coffee around her nose, scenting the air with an edge of cinnamon. The coffee was homemade – her first of the day – and she looked forward to her trip to Starbucks on her lunchbreak, a Monday tradition. To celebrate the start of another week. To celebrate still being alive.

“You never told me this was going to be so hard.”

She spoke to no one in particular, though she rested her head back against the stone. She wasn’t religious, so she didn’t believe her mother was somehow around her, but every so often, she craned her ears, heard the branches rustle with a robin come to rest, and she felt assured that someone was listening, if only the bird.

That was the second reason she came so early in the morning. The act of being heard, even if only by inert slabs of rock. She kept so quiet at home, rarely inviting people round, rarely in the flat long enough to make a sound. If a guest came in, it was like a show room. It reminded her too much of her mum, so much so that it felt like her chest was splintering.

She draped her bare fingers through the snow and grit her teeth around the words that dug their claws into her throat, resisting her.

“I think I might leave my job,” she admitted. She had thought about it before, but never voiced it to anyone. Now, the only people who knew were the bodies around her. Suzanna’s gravestone gazed at her, and Naomi imagined what might happen if there were ghosts around her, if they were listening to her words. What she might say if they were.

She drew inwards suddenly, as though she had glimpsed that reality. All the eyes on her, waiting for what she said next.

She sipped her coffee and tried to picture her mother’s face behind her eyelids, a useless endeavour that only ended in that knife cutting deeper through her chest. All she could summon was the image of the last time she saw her mum before the accident, after the fight.

The fight. A trivial thing that haunted Naomi’s waking nightmare. It was entirely avoidable, as well. All she had to do was not bring up her father, a man she had never wanted or needed in her life but for some reason was compelled to mention.

Even the thought of him brought back the smell of banana bread, which her mother had been baking that evening for the birthday they were attending the next day. It was for a family friend that Naomi had now not seen in years, not since the funeral. All of it was more than she was equipped to deal with.

The graveyard was not a place of peace for her. She was aware only of the familiar overwhelm of mourning, the very same feeling that had supplanted in her chest the night the police turned up at her door, telling her that her mother had been involved in a fatal car accident. Dead at the scene, they said. Paramedics did all they could, they said. They said a lot of things, but none of it changed the initial intensity of the realisation that this could have been avoided.

Naomi massaged her forehead with her fist, the throbbing of her temple becoming too much. An ache formed behind her eyes and stars blurred her vision when she squeezed her eyelids shut. The coffee did little to soothe the fatigue that dampened her bones.

She was treading water all the time, hoping for a little respite in the form of an island but only finding driftwood. It felt like she was destined to drown.

“Tell me what to do, Mum.”

Her words escaped her in an exhale, and she kept her eyes shut, aware that she might drift into a long, dreamless sleep here in the snow. Hoping for it.

They say that the last stage of grief is acceptance, but she didn’t agree. In fact, she laughed at the notion that there could ever be a point where she accepted this, where she was able to move on and forgive herself. When she even came close to happiness, she just remembered those words. Her last words to Naomi.

“Nothing is ever good enough for you. You’ll never be content.”

Was that an observation or an omen? Because, so far, the woman had been right, in death as she was in life.

Leaving her job was the only thing she could imagine would fix the thick weight of depression that hugged her to the ground and anchored her to her bed. She wasn’t sure why, but she had a feeling that was what she needed.

That wasn’t wholly true. What would fix the weight was bringing her mum back to life, but she wasn’t so naïve. This was the next best thing.

She hummed into her coffee, laughing a little to herself.

“Look at me now, huh?” she said. “Just like you said. Miserable.”

She stood up and turned towards the grave, the grave that she could barely stomach looking at. Her feet crunched through the snow as she marched to the foot of the mound, where her mother lay. She imagined the woman as though she was asleep, lips parted around her steady breaths.

“Is this what you wanted?” Her voice cut past her teeth like shards of glass, and she wiped the spittle from her lip, her coffee dangling from her fingertips. “Did you want to teach me a lesson?”

The gravestone stared back at her, unperturbed. Somehow, that angered her more.

“Lesson learned,” she said. Her blood clung to her face, blotchy red marks on her cheeks, and her breath steamed around her face. She could smell the coffee on her breath. “Now, come back. Come home.”

The thought of going back to that empty flat, to those walls devoid of that woman singing Take That songs under her breath and baking fucking banana bread every opportunity there was, made her body grow heavy. She sagged under the weight of it and sank down into the snow, her flask hitting the hard undergrowth.

“Please, Mum,” she exhaled. She looked up at the gravestone, fingers leaden by frost, and let the wintry air cling to her for a moment, imagined what it felt like for the life to be dragged from her, the vitality sucked from her pores. A life, over. Slung through the veil.

Nobody said anything, and Naomi became aware of the burning of her breath in her lungs. She stared at her mother’s name and sighed. All that life, and still not enough. It would never have been enough.

As much as she could have sat at that grave and begged the ground to shuffle away from her mother’s reanimated body, she knew that was not going to happen. The same realisation that she’d had several times before passed over her – at some point, she would have to start living again, even if she wasn’t ready to let go.

She stood up and wiped snow from her knees, though there was little she could do about the cold water soaked through to her bare legs.

“I’ll be back soon,” she said.

She walked towards the exit, flask cushioned against her mouth, she looked at the cars as they came to life outside, the world reanimating as though it had failed to exist while she had been in there. Across the road, the lights in the convenience store switched on, and two employees fiddled with the register by the front window. She paused at the lip of the cemetery, poised just under the hefty metal gates, and watched the snow begin to fall again.

All was well with the universe, all except her. She couldn’t decide if that was a comfort or not. All she could bring herself to decide was that next time she would bring white roses, the very same her mum placed on the countertop on a Sunday after Church. She might even buy some for herself.