The Grave of Valerie Kovsky

I stepped out of my car and slammed the door behind me. The sky was a deep, bright blue with a few wisps of white cloud scattered throughout. The grass was full, thick, the same shade of green you see in fertilizer commercials, and probably due to be mowed soon. The air was silent, and I could feel the sun caressing my left cheek. I scanned the yard and picked out the tall oak tree, the same one my daughter was buried next to. I crossed the gate into the cemetery, stopped, thought I left the flowers in the car, and then realized I was holding them in my hand. I sighed and made my way over to the grave.

When I came to the stone with "Elena Smith" engraved on it, the thought occurred to me that I was standing right on top of her. I stepped off to the side, in front of the oak tree, and looked at the stone from there. I tried to bend over to set the flowers on top of her, but a sharp pain forced me to stand back up, cringing. My back isn't what it used to be. Still wincing, I turned around, leaned against the tree, and slid down to the ground. Then I set the flowers down on my right, in front of the stone. I wanted to get up, but the sun felt nice on my face, and somehow I felt tired. I fell asleep next to her.

The sound of a car door woke me up. When I opened my eyes, a young man was walking into the cemetery. Well, young to me, but probably in his mid-forties. Thin, but with a potbelly, and the first signs of baldness starting to attack his hairline. An ordinary man, as far as I could tell, except he seemed angry for some reason. He stormed in through the grass, turning his head this way and that, glaring all the while. Finally, his eyes locked onto one of the gravestones. He stopped, balled up his fists, and came on at a rapid, shuffling pace. He stopped in front of a stone only a few rows to my right, and a bit uphill of me. He stood there with his face twisting between a grin and a scowl for a few seconds. Then he laughed.

"Well, there you are. How do you like that? I come all this way to see you, and there you are. Well, I knew you'd be here, but still!"

His speech was fast and nervous. He sounded out of breath. He let out a thin laugh as he reached into his pocket for a cigarette. He lit it, puffed it once, then hurled it to the ground and stomped on it, hard.

"Do you know how long I've wanted to have this talk with you? Let me tell you, when I first practiced it in my head, you were alive, and I had a full head of hair. You wanna know why I never did it? Well, one day I was eating at a restaurant. By myself, obviously. At another table, this middle-aged guy was sitting there with his two, old, grey-haired parents. And this guy, he just starts ranting, and raving, and screaming at them, tallying up every single thing they'd ever done wrong by him. It was disgusting. What a jackass, I thought.

"No, that's not why I never did it. I was never above looking like a jackass. I am a jackass. And anyway, that never happened. Well, except I am that middle-aged man now. And you're dead now. So let's have this talk now, huh? It's just me, and you, and-"

He stopped and looked around. His eyes locked onto me and he froze. Then he looked back at the stone.

"Well, there's that old man over there. What do you think, should I go home? No, I drove two hours for this. Let him listen, I don't care. I'll never see him again.

"But what do I say? It's weird, I could pace around my house for hours, just muttering and seething at some imaginary version of you. Or, probably not hours. But the urge could strike me at any time, I could be in the shower, or driving, and I could just start being mad at you. I could be at work, working on some stupid project, and all the while be silently imagining the moment where I would finally confront you for what you did. But now, now that I'm finally here, I don't know how to start.

"Oh, whatever. I've already started anyway. You know, I have to imagine all your reactions to what I'm saying. Since you’re down there and I’m up here. You're getting angry, you're getting defensive, you're getting upset, you're accusing me of being mean to you. But you're not apologizing. Oh no, keep that in mind. I've never once, in all this time, ever imagined that you might apologize to me. This was never some narcissistic fantasy on my part; I never imagined that I might prevail upon you with the strength of my arguments or the depth of my feelings, and in so doing force you to apologize at last. I never imagined for a single instant that you ever would or could apologize. Because in fact I did confront you once, right after it happened. You seemed to have no idea what I was so mad about. You got all indignant with me, as though I of all people had no right to accuse you.

"'There's two sides to every story,' you said.

"Well, maybe that's true. Only you yourself never seemed to believe that. For all the rest of your life, you used to talk about it. Joke about it, laugh about it with your friends. You'd do it right in front of me, as though I were supposed to laugh about it too. As though I were supposed to agree with you that it was all her fault, and not yours at all. What I want to know is what happened to your 'two sides?'

"And that's the whole crux of the matter. What would have been the point in confronting you about it? Even right after it happened, you had no understanding that you had done anything wrong. By the time you died, you must have been living in some alternate reality where it was all her fault, and all my fault, where I was the one who’d insulted you, and you were the one who forgave me.

"And I did forgive you. Yes I did. It took a few years, but eventually I could forgive you any time I saw you or heard your voice. Confronted with the real you, all these negative feelings I had for you just couldn't be sustained. And I guess that's the real reason why I didn't have this talk with you in time. Because I never wanted to.

"But the problem with forgiveness, the thing nobody wants to talk about, is that it's not a one-and-done thing. It's like a place. It's like a patch of slippery floor, and you can slip onto it and right back off of it, both almost against your own will. So whenever I left your presence, in a matter of minutes, or hours, or days, I would be mad again. And I'd be ashamed of having forgiven you. It would feel as though you'd somehow tricked me into it with smooth talk or favors.

"Now that's the real worst part of it. The favors. After everything was over, after my whole life was over, you could be so nice to me. Sometimes you were even really helpful. After you ruined my life forever, you liked to do nice things for me. Does it make sense if I say that was indecent? If I say that was the most insulting part of it all? It was as though you thought you could make our relationship normal again without bothering to apologize. And it worked! It worked! And that's what I really hate you for. Even as you drove away all your family and friends throughout the years, one by one and all through your own damn fault, I stayed crushed under your thumb. I was too weak to cut you off. Just me. Out of everyone you insulted, out of everyone you injured, I was the only one you managed to keep in your little bubble."

The man's tone had grown steadily louder and more frantic, until at last his foot was drawn back as if to kick the stone. At the sight of that, I leapt to my feet in indignation. I opened my mouth, but he brought his foot down and continued to speak before I could say anything.

"No. No, no, the real worst part of it was that you were okay afterward. You got to go on living your nice, fulfilling life, and you got to go on being a good person, and I didn't. You got better, and I didn't. Out of everyone involved, only you got to be okay, even though it was all your fault. I've got nothing, nobody. I haven't had anybody since then and I'll never have anybody again. And she, she died. She died before you did. I didn't know. I didn't find out until the other day."

The man began to glance around, as if looking for a clock. When he didn't find one in the open cemetery, he looked back down at the grave and sighed.

"Well, I don't think I'll see you again. I'm sure you managed to get into Heaven somehow, in spite of everything. But I think I'll be mad at you for the rest of my life, so I don't think they'll let me in to see you."

The man's shoulders dropped as his face fell into a heavy frown.

"Just leave me alone, mom."

With that, the man turned around and sped out of the cemetery with the same nervous agitation he'd walked in with. He got into his car and slowly made his way out of the parking lot. Then, turning onto the highway, his engine roared and he sped out of sight.

I looked down at my daughter's grave and saw the wind had already scattered the flowers I'd laid on it.

"I'm sorry, Nellie. I'll see you again next year."

Nellie did not respond.