And when I ask him how he’s doing, he doesn’t always say fine.
Sometimes he says, “Kind of bad today.”
Sometimes he says, “I miss Dad.”
Once, he said, “I’m mad at him for dying and I know that’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid,” I told him. “I’m mad at him too.”
He looked surprised. Then relieved. Then we sat on the back porch together where David used to teach him chords, and we were mad at David together for a while, and that turned out to be its own strange kind of comfort.
I go to a grief group now, on Thursday nights, in the basement of a church downtown. Officer Reyes told me about it. Her father died the year before she joined the force. The first night I went, I sat in a metal folding chair and didn’t say anything for the whole hour. The second night, I said my name. The fourth night, I told them about the gym, and the doors, and forty three officers singing a song about pancakes. A woman across the circle started crying, and then she laughed, and then she said, “I’m sorry, I just really needed to hear that.”
