'Why can't you come back?'
Meredith thought while she looked at the head stone of her husband's grave. It was a warm morning in the beginning of October. It had been two and a half years since he had died and it felt like the seasons had passed her by ever since. She had never understood the rationale behind cemeteries. Her mother's ashes had been drowned in the sink of OR1 and she had hardly ever visited Lexie's or George's grave, but for some reason she felt closer to Derek here than anywhere else. It was nice to see that People remembered him. Whenever she came to visit the grave, she would find some flowers in front of the stone. Sometimes Zola asked her to take her pictures with her and leave it there for him.
But maybe she liked the cemetery so much because being a single mother of three left little to know quiet time for herself. The weekly visit created room to reflect on her life. She often wondered what Derek would have told her. He had told her years ago that he wouldn't want her to be alone if anything happened to him -and she had tried to do it. She had taken Nathan home and the day she wanted to introduce him to the children, the universe had intervened and brought back her boyfriend's dead fiance from the dead. Hours later she had turned up at the hospital and to make matters worse, she liked her. She liked her and Megan wanted her to fix her.
She sat in the sun and looked at the trees in the close proximity. While some were still white, most of the leaves had turned brown – or red or yellow. 'Derek would have loved this' she thought to herself. The trees looked beautiful and she knew how much he had enjoyed sitting on their deck and looking at the forest. All of this felt like it had happened a million years ago, in another lifetime. It had never occured to her that it would feel like this. She had forgotten the taste of his lips, the way his piercing blue eyes would rest on her face and he would smile when she woke up or the way the sound of his voice changed when he was talking about the things he loved – including her. It wasn't fair that Derek didn't get to see this - that she didn't get to die a hundred years old in his arms. It wasn't fair that she needed to move on -and that things came tumbling down whenever she thought she had taken a step forward.
Kissing Nathan for the first time had felt like cheating on Derek even though she knew that he wasn't around. Giving in to the possibility of them being together had felt like she needed to let him go once again -and after a while it felt good to feel the touch of someone's lips on her body or wake up next to someone. They had shared the mutual feeling of loss, but Nathan deserved a chance with the love of his life -and she didn't want to stand in the way of that. All she was able to do now, was to watch and observe. She was back to being the other woman and all she could do was to stand in the back, focus on her kids and see how everyone was trying to move on in their life without her. She was a silent observer. Alex would go back to Jo eventually, Amelia and Owen would make beautiful babies and only God knew what Maggie was up to. She was still able to go back to waffle Sundays -and be the mom her mother never was, but the kids would be gone – it was only a matter of time- and she would still be there and Derek would still be gone. And the leaves would still fall in fall.
She looked at her pager and got up. One of the sub interns had found the 'perfect abs' for Megan. She needed to get moving.