Rosie’s grief counseling meeting was held in a community center, in a suburb outside of the city. The room was used for all kinds of different activities, I guessed, looking at the posters and the bookshelves and the ill-cleaned tables from a pottery class. There were five people there, sitting on folding chairs in a loose circle in the center of the floor. They all looked up when I peeked in, and Rosie’s eyes lit up when she saw me. My heart swelled in response, but I stayed quiet and moved slowly. I wasn’t here to talk to her, but to stay nearby in case the Gifted came looking for trouble. Were they likely to? Not here, I knew, not this far from everything, but where else could I protect her? It was the least I could do.
I thought about the boy from the rest home, and I knew I could do more. Was it worth it, making connections with people only to have them disappear? I had to make sure Rosie didn’t disappear.
“Come in,” said Rosie, beckoning with her hand, and I opened the door wider. She stood and pulled another chair into the circle, and I hesitated a moment longer in the doorway. It would be best if I left now and cut off all of my communication with Rosie. I could protect her just as well from the shadows, waiting outside and following her home, but then she took a step toward me, just a single step, and I couldn’t help myself. I walked into the room. She gestured to the chair, and I sat in it gingerly, as if expecting at any moment for the room to erupt in chaos and terror and death.
All was still.
“Welcome to our group,” she said, smiling softly. “My name is Rose. Would you like to introduce yourself?”
I almost said Billy—it was on the tip of my tongue—but I caught myself. I knew I should leave, but I took a slow breath. “Elijah,” I said. “Elijah Sexton.”
“Hello, Elijah,” said Rosie. “Thank you for coming today. This is a very open group; most of what we do is just talk, and we’ve all gone through some of the same hard experiences, so you’ll find us to be a pretty understanding audience. You told me before that you’d lost someone. Would you like to talk about it?”
I looked around at the others in the group: a middle-aged woman with a wide, grim face; a tall, skinny man behind a pair of thick black glasses; a pair of older people that looked like a couple. It struck me suddenly that I knew them all—that every one of the people in this grief counseling session were here because of me, because of someone I had been, their father or their sister or their friend. I was overwhelmed by a sense of loss so staggering that I knew I could never hope to overcome it or escape it. I tried to speak, but nothing came, and I shook my head helplessly. “What is there to say?”
“Whatever you want,” said Rosie. She tilted her head to the side in a sympathetic gesture. “Who did you lose?”
“My wife,” I said, repeating what I’d told her before.
“Would you like to tell us about her?”
There were so many, both young and old; sometimes I died first, and sometimes they died and left me alone. I stared at the floor, careful not to look at her, and tried to think of something to say.
I remembered another woman, barely more than a girl, a lifetime ago on the slopes of a great mountain. We lived in a hut of mud and thatch, watching a small flock of sheep on a field of short, stiff grass and twisted trees. She laughed freely, and she worked hard, and she died in childbirth, and I couldn’t remember if I was her husband or if I was her. Maybe I was both, and her parents, and her child. I took so many back then.
Rosie and the others simply watched me, silent and supportive, giving me time to think before I spoke.
I opened my mouth, trying to think of a story they wouldn’t recognize, a story Rosie wouldn’t immediately see herself staring back from, but they were all the same: someone left, and someone else was left behind. The world was a broken puzzle, the pieces dumped out in a pile on the floor, close without ever being connected.
“Is it worth it?” I asked suddenly. I couldn’t get that boy’s words out of my mind. “We spend our whole lives making connections with people who are inevitably, every time and without fail, going to leave us. Unless we leave them first, which might actually be worse. We’re building a foundation that cannot last, with materials that will never hold, and time goes on and mountains crumble and everybody dies, everyone and everything that ever was, and I . . . I am so old.” I felt it then like I’d never felt it before, the sheer weight of my endless, ageless life, as deep and as black as a bottomless pit. It was age that ruined the Gifted—not time, for time was fleeting, but age itself. The relentless buildup of days and nights and days, of waking and doing and being and sleeping, over and over, forever. “Even my memories fade,” I said softly, looking down at the keys on my lanyard, but Rosie stopped me with a single sentence.
“Do you feel that lasting—that staying, that remaining—are the only things that give something meaning?”
We’d thought that once, in the beginning. We wanted immortality, and we were willing to give up anything to get it. I don’t remember what I’d given up, but I knew it was a part of me so deep, so central to myself, that I had never been the same person since. None of us had. We had reached for a gift, but we’d reached too far and we had withered instead, like dead vines shriveling in a glaring summer sun.
“Give meaning to what?” I asked, feeling bitter and empty. “If I give you meaning and you die, what good has it done?”
“You can’t give me meaning,” she said simply. “It’s not yours to give; I have to do that on my own. Elijah, what has meaning for you?”
I looked at Rosie, remembering the day we were married, and the long nights we’d spent sick or worried or joyful in each other’s arms. “People,” I said.
“And what happened when those people were gone?”
I stared at her, so close I could almost touch her, and my voice came out in a strained whisper. “It is so much worse than simply being gone.”
Rosie nodded, silent a moment, before speaking softly. “A life can be important because it affects other things, and it can have purpose because of what it accomplishes, or what it intends to accomplish, and those are active words. They have movement and life behind them, and when somebody dies, that life goes away, and it feels sometimes like the purpose and importance goes with them.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Meaning is different. A life has meaning when it means something to someone else, and it can never do that on its own. It means something to me. To you. When that life is gone, it hurts us and it changes us and it feels sometimes like we’re tearing apart, but no matter where that life goes, or if it even goes anywhere at all, the things that it meant are still there because it meant them to you. And as long as you hold that inside of you, it’s not just meant, in the past tense, but meaning, in the present. Right now. You asked if making connections was worth it, and I promise you: it’s the only worthwhile thing in the world.”