Chapter Four
Sayid walked from the one-room school house where he had just taught a basic biology lesson to children ranging from ages three to five. He was not, he considered, gifted to be a teacher, but he had been asked to be a guest instructor, and he had conceded. Perhaps it would be easier when the children were older. Yet he found himself growing frustrated with them in much the same way he had grown frustrated with Shannon when she had been unable to find a significant translation to the maps. He was surprised by the children's self-defensive yet self-defeating reactions to his frustration, just as he had been bewildered when Shannon had stormed away from the maps. His words, which had not, he did not think, been loudly or cruelly spoken, had caused them to give up rather than to work harder at understanding. He sighed and turned his footsteps towards the cemetery.
This evening, he would do his duty as council chair and sever the legal ties between two people. Yet two days later, he would stand at he mouth of this cemetery as part of a tightly nit community. Together, as one, they would observe Memorial Day.
That community had once been bound together by the ropes of loss and grief and anger and fear, but as the years rolled on, as the battles with the Others became each year a slightly more distant history, Sayid knew that the meaning of Memorial Day would change. To Aaron's generation, it would not be and could not be a day spent consumed in personal grief, where people remembered the innocent loved ones slain, either directly or indirectly, by those Others who believed they were acting in the name of good.
And that change would be good, Sayid thought. It was right to remember the evil of which their enemies were capable. It was wise to remind themselves to remain alert to future threats. It was just to honor both those who had given their lives and those who had had their lives unwittingly taken from them. But it was not good to fixate on those losses, on those bodies rolled beneath the dirt and sand, to allow the great wave of grief to keep on rolling in to drown the living, as though they lacked the will to overcome the works of their enemies.
Memorial day would always be cloaked in solemnity, but each year it would be wrought with less and less grief. When Aaron was a man, Sayid believed, the community would continue to observe this day that commemorated the victims of the Others. Most cultures, it seemed to him, ritually mourned some momentous period of suffering in their history, some particular day of destruction, or some war. It was good that this community should do the same, so that as their descendants grew and flourished, they would not forget their own mortality, they would not grow complacent in their prosperity, and they would not allow their differences to make them overlook the common values that forged them into one people.
Sayid stood now at the foot of Shannon's cross. He could not remember when he had last lain flowers here; that year, he thought, on the anniversary of her death. He had not forgotten her, but he had pressed on. He had taken the light she had given him, and he had shone in on others, on a wife, on a son, on a whole community. He had lived, as he had wanted her to live. And even if he recorded the severing of a dozen more marriages, or entered the date of a dozen more wrongful deaths, he would go on living, filling the community record book with marriages and births and trades, filling the book with life and more life.