"Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you."

― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

36

I didn't have a lot of love for Phoenix.

Being older and firmer in their free will meant that Rose and Alice had never had to do obligatory trips to stay with Renee. Granted, I only had to do three. The first time, she tried to get all serious and preachy on me about the separation. I hadn't seen her for ten months after she left, and she already seemed like a different person to me, so when she made it even more awkward for me, I bawled my eyes out and insisted that Rose book me an early flight home. I left the next day.

The second time, her asshole boyfriend almost put me off ever seeing either of them ever again for the rest of my life. As well as being what Alice fondly referred to as a "cunt" – the only person we reserved that word for – he also liked his alcohol an awful lot, making him even more intolerable. I believe I even used the Hollywood moment of "you're not my father" on him, before storming up the stairs. He had a mouth on him a sailor couldn't dream of; he thought he was hysterically funny with his dry and dirty humor, and he shoved Renee about when he got fucked off at the tiniest things. Between that and the loud banging of the headboard against the wall – something at twelve I hadn't been exposed to before – they were really doing a swell job of including Renee's youngest kid in their new lifestyle. The third time was the sleeping pill fun. That was the end of that.

Needless to say, Phoenix had always been associated with the shit-storm that went along with Renee. This trip was no different. Renee's retail business had finally been run into the ground, and shutting it down was managed by a receivership and liquidation company. Her lawyer informed us that after some investigation, an account that Renee hadn't known about had been discovered in the scumbag's name. Turned out the money he'd been skimming from her business and her pocket had ended up there and was apparently now rightfully ours. It hadn't been easy for the lawyer to solve, and I certainly couldn't get my head around all the complications that Renee and her thieving boyfriend had managed to create for themselves. It was his dodgy dealings that had us in the position we were in now. The scumbag owed the other gunman a whole lost of cash, which results in weapons being pulled when you piss some one off and string them along as much as he had.

Alice and I didn't really want anything to do with the contents of his secret account. We instructed him to donate it to various charities. Her house had been mortgaged against the business, so the bank put that on the market. It had been brought with our grandfather's money, so we decided we'd split any profit outside the mortgage repayment into college funds for any kids Alice and I may have, and for Ben. The rest of her will was mostly my grandmother's diamonds, which Renee had had made into a monstrous pyramid of a ring rather than dividing them between her girls as my grandmother had wanted. Alice was taking it to a jeweler in Seattle to have them removed from the setting.

Between Alice, Jasper, and me, we managed to clear out her house, boxing up any family heirlooms to courier back to Seattle, and donating the rest to local shelters and charities. It was one of the strangest things I'd ever had to do. We were basically extinguishing the physical remnants of a person from the world. The finality of it was bizarre.

My phone beeped as I was loading a few hundred pairs of shoes into the rental van to deliver to Goodwill and the Salvation Army.

I miss you x

Man, I really, really miss you back. x

Is it going ok today?

As well as it could, I suppose. It's harder than I expected.

You're stronger than you realize, gorgeous girl.

I give you a lot of credit for that. x

I wish you knew it was inherent. Whatever I do for you is just a bonus.

You're perfect, Dr. C. So looking forward to coming home tomorrow.

Can't wait. Swim and dinner at mine if you're up to it. Talk tonight. xx

Sitting on the plane back to Seattle the next day, I found myself thinking a lot about the concept of closure. People always talk about getting closure from whatever troubles you. While I wanted the ache to dissipate, I didn't want closure. Not from this.

I wanted the life of Rose to remain open to me; all that she was, my memories with her, her image, everything. I didn't want the cover on the enormous volume of her short life to ever close on its pages. It should remain open on the coffee table for all to see, able to be leafed through without lifting off the heavy bound front or ever hearing the thud of it close when you were finished looking.

Renee felt a little different. With her it was more like her death had really been the final page in her book. Where Rose lived on in Ben, the intertwining with Renee was almost less involved. She'd been such an elusive character in both our story and her own. She was almost unwritable. From her own discombobulated mind, to our lack of understanding of that mind, I didn't see how her pages could remain open with any soulful or constructive purpose. I wanted closure of the questions, the analysis, the lack of understanding. I wanted the place in my heart that held space for the woman who gave me life to remain open to her in relative simplicity. It wasn't that I didn't want to remember her, I just needed to remember her a certain way.

Rose had been taken much too soon, and it truly seemed that her youth and necessity held her present. She was free, and in another place, but that place was very much with us. I sensed her everywhere. Not in a particularly concrete or supernatural way, more like she was a certain grain of weight in the air, or a tiny hint of fragrance. It was hard to describe without sounding as though you were losing your mind or imagining spirits. I wasn't the spiritual type, but the death of loved ones imparted things in you that you weren't looking for, or expecting to find. I concluded that Renee had herself found closure. When they said, "Rest in peace," that was what I associated with Renee. She had closure from a situation she didn't know how to get herself out of – because deep down I truly believed Renee wasn't happy with where she ended up with that man. It was a god-awful way to escape – nothing but tragic and fucking unnecessary – yet, if you could find one modicum of contentment on her final page, it was that my mother was finally resting at peace.

That was the only sense I could make of the difference. I felt slightly more ready to live again, after finding where their place was in my days. At least that sounded good in theory. I only hoped the reality of how I would think of them would follow through as gently reasoned as my mind had decided it should.