Stopping by Woods
a Rizzoli and Isles fic by SJO
Note: Rizzoli and Isles is owned by TNT, not me. This is based on Lee Thompson Young's recent suicide, and it assumes that Frost will be killed off. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" should be in public domain, but because of this website's rules about posting another person's work, I won't post it here. If you're familiar with the poem, please look it up.
Anyone who knows me knows that my first love is science, but I have another . . . appreciation. I have always been fond of poetry—Longfellow, Dickenson, Yeats, Elliot. And sure, maybe one of the reasons is because most of them wrote about death in such beautiful ways. I suppose I didn't study poetry at length because in school my teachers and professors all expected me to analyze them. They said every poem was symbolic, and it was up to me to figure out what the symbolism is, and I kept wondering why can't the words just speak for themselves? Why can't poetry be like clothes, so we could just look at them and enjoy their beauty?
When I first met Barry Frost, I immediately thought of Robert Frost. He's always been one of my favorites. I always wanted to ask if they were related, but I held that question back because I thought he might be insulted. I never told him, but a lot of times when I saw him, I thought of Frost's poetry. I thought of a different poem every time.
After I heard the news, I went to the morgue early in the morning, 5:00. And I waited. And waited. And waited. Jane found me, and she said, "He's not coming, Maura."
And I said, "No, they have to bring him here. I have to do my job, Jane."
She said, "You're not gonna find anything. We all know what happened."
I told her, "But there has to be something. Maybe there were drugs in his system. Maybe he had a condition he didn't tell us about. It could be—"
And she put her hand on my elbow and shook her head, and she said, "There are some mysteries not even an autopsy can solve."
That has to be the saddest thing I have heard in my whole life.
I went to my office and I cried. And then I thought of probably my favorite Robert Frost poem, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." I remembered every word, said it to myself. The English teacher who taught it to me said it was about death. At the time, I just wanted it to be a nice poem about watching the snow fall, but in that moment, it made sense.
Perhaps that's why it happened. Frost couldn't wait to see that snowy wood. He forgot his promises, and he took his leave. It's not much of an answer, but it's the only one I have. It may be the only one I'll ever know.