Hello friends! I failed to give some appreciation towards a couple of my helpers- I sat down and had dinner with a group of five of my guy friends to gain insight on how guys deal with loss. They were both extremely goofy, but very helpful. Since I forget to dedicate this last chapter to them, this one will be.

Chapter Eleven- Wide Oceans of Grief

For all of you boys who made me understand the depth of a guy's mind when he's hurting

Ryan

Kevin

Ben

Josh

David

This one is for you. : )


The leaves crunched under his dress shoes as he walked up the hill. His heart was drowning in a hundred sorrows to fill the ocean that stretched a few miles away. Tears filled his eyes that were the color of the midnight sky. Typically, they held the glory of the stars of the universe amongst them but since the fateful day a week ago, those stars lost their magnitude due to a heavy blanket of fog.

Lucas Scott never experienced pain like this, the roaring throbbing pain coming from his heart with every passing minute. Physically, yes, he had experienced such pain coming from his heart but emotionally this had been a first time. His thoughts faced a vicious spinning circle. He just could not let himself move pass the fact that Keith died. Keith, his uncle that sacrificed so much so Lucas could have a man to rightfully call father, had been killed the week before.

Months before, Lucas and his entire literature class had an assignment to write about loss. He could not place at that moment what exactly he wrote as his greatest loss but he knew that it would not compare to the empty hole Keith left behind. After eighteen years of selflessly loving Lucas like his own son, Keith went out to sign papers to officially adopt Lucas during school. Lucas and he would go out for dinner and a basketball game in Charlotte to commemorate the event after school. That day had been January 26. The day of the shooting.

Lucas stood by his mother's side as the preacher went over the Lord's Prayer. He barely heard the words out of the man's mouth. He found himself transfixed at the dark wooden coffin. Inside of it held rare, one of a kind man, a man that spent his thirty four years of life selflessly helping people at no cost to him.

Lucas stood with his hands crossed. Karen shuddered next to him. His fingers wanted to reach over to her and hold her but he felt frozen. Every time he would think about stretching over and holding her, he could not shake an evil thought;

It is your fault she's upset.

Every time those horrible words played in his mind, a sob attempted to come up from his heart and into his throat. He forced it down like food stuck in a person's throat that had been choking; he fought to keep it down where it belonged. He was choking on the heartbreak of losing his uncle and even more so with the thought that it was his fault. No one had said it directly to him but when his mother made it out of her room to use the rest room, she avoided his gaze like he too could kill her.

As selfish as it was to admit, Lucas wished with all his heart she would look at him. He wanted her to look at him and see how broken he was. Maybe his mother could look past her own hurt and help fix her little boy like she used to whenever he was hurt. Lucas did not anticipate that to happen anytime soon being she was far past drowning in the ocean of grief.

Karen stood next to her only son fighting the tears away. She could barely keep her eyes open for every time she did, she saw the coffin and it would force her to realize the depth of how much it all hurt. The one man she truly loved and gave her heart to was snatched away from her. She felt fifty different emotions all at once; grief, depression, anger, resentment, guilt, and somewhere in there a building of a terrible hatred towards her son.

It took everything in her not to march in his room at night and scream every obscenity at him. If it had not been for him staying in the school instead of escaping like the rest of his classmates, Keith probably would have stayed with her. Karen attempted to push the terrible thoughts down but she battled every waking moment with not only the loss of the man she loved, but the struggle to love her son despite the possibility that it was his fault.

Karen had that reason alone to crucify her son but she had another reason to be upset with him. He had a minor heart attack after he carried Keith out of the school. Not only did he come close to death himself, she had found out he had been lying to her for quite sometime. He had assured her he had tested negative for the testing of the genetic heart condition his father had. The boy even went as far to give her a letter informing him of this.

It had been cruel slap in the face when the doctor informed her that her seventeen year old boy suffered a mild heart attack. Trying to not to suffocate under the weight of all the pain coming down on her, Karen asked the doctor how it was possible for him to have heart attack. He informed her of that it is a definite possibility for a heart attack to happen when a person has HCM. When Karen made a face, the doctor asked if she knew her son had it. She felt humiliated that she did not know her son had a life threatening condition.

Karen sat numbly as the doctor explained the protocol for getting Lucas back on the track of normalcy. Not only had she lost Keith but that night she found out her son had been lying to her about a fatal disease. Provided she had not have frozen in her seat, she would have probably marched in the room and killed him herself. She never felt so betrayed in her entire life.

The priest had said something that brought Karen back to reality. Lucas nodded stiffly and walked closer to the grave. Karen shut her eyes as pain panged her broken heart. It took everything for her not to let her stomach empty out its few contents all over the place. Anything she ate over the last few days came back up almost instantly. She felt the world spinning around her but yet it felt like it was frozen in place, in a place of darkness and shadows.

Lucas's hands quivered as they gripped the dirt mound. He took a deep shaky breath as he closed his eyes. Why did he have to bury his father? This was supposed to happen when Keith became an old man, when they shared decades of memories together as father and son. Keith needed to see Lucas graduate, publish his novels, get married to the girl of his dreams, being the grandfather of his children…not die the day he became his father. It was not fair. Lucas let the dirt slide out of his grasp. His eyes watered seeing the dirt slip through his fingers.

Once the funeral workers lowered Keith's coffin to the ground, people lined up to hug Karen and shake Lucas's hands. Lucas's close friends hug him tightly and it took everything in him not let his tears roll. As people rambled their memories with Keith and condolences, Lucas looked past them. His eyes were fixed on the gravestone. It stated his full name, birthday, and the day he died but the words underneath were the ones that he read over and over;

A Great Father

Lucas needed to get out of that area fast. The pain in his heart was all too overwhelming too handle. His mother started heading down the hill to Coach Whitey Durham's truck with her arm held inside his. Lucas followed behind them. As Whitey had held the door open for Karen to get in, Lucas came up to the man.

"I'm going to go for a run," he shakingly spoke.

Whitey shut the door once Karen got in the passenger's seat. Her eyes looked at something distant. Whitey nodded, "If you need anything Lucas, my door is always opened."

"Thanks coach," Lucas responded.

Whitey hit the boy in the back as a gesture of love and compassion. He knew the boy had been dealing with a great deal of grief and wanted to make him sure, he was not facing it all alone.

Lucas looked over at his shivering mother and took of his suit coat. He placed it on her, their first physical contact since before the shooting. She sat still as he covered her shoulders. After getting it situated, he leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. She took a deep trembling breath as she shut her eyes. She fought any kind of urge to snap.

Afterwards, Lucas took his much needed run. He had no idea where exactly he would end up so he trusted his legs to carry him wherever. His heart pounded furiously as the run slowly ended. Lucas stopped not knowing exactly where he was at. He looked up at the building before him and found Keith's apartment complex in front of him.

Lucas entered the complex and headed over to the place where Keith lived and so did so many memories of the two of them. He found the door unlocked and pushed it open. Immediately, the strong masculine smell of his deceased father filled his nostrils. The smell brought tears to his eyes especially when his eyes fell upon a frame holding a picture of Keith and him.

The picture displayed Keith in a swimming pool with the water up the mid section of stomach area with Lucas, probably age six, sitting upon his shoulders. Lucas had his arms held high in the air with a water basketball in his grip. The both of them shared wide grins on their faces.

Wiping a tear that snuck out of his eye, Lucas saw an envelope next to the frame addressed to him in Keith's writing. He took the envelope in his hands and plopped down on a couch. He stared at his father quick penmanship and contemplated opening it.

Lucas took a deep shaky breath and slowly tore the envelope open. He found with in its contents a three page letter. The three paged letter lead him to laugh a few times but also to cry. He held in his hands the last words his father would ever say to him.


Next someone will come in the apartment and shove more pain in Lucas's face. Stay tune. : )