There is a potential life that I can never go back to. There is that life where the phone doesn’t ring that night. I get up and have too much coffee. I worry a little bit every day about Sarah, I am mad at a lot of the choices she makes. It’s there, in the back of my mind, when I go to the courthouse to legally marry my partner.
In this life, though, on the day I had planned to sign my marriage certificate, I go to the beach with my family and a few close friends and scatter my sister’s ashes where the mouth of a river meets the ocean. My mother and I stand in the water and shake her remains into the sea. My sister and I stood in the same spot a few years before, to watch the vestiges of our father drift away.
We send flowers down the river with her. I watch them float away and think, I will never be able to choose flowers for my wedding without remembering this moment. I won’t be able to look at peonies, roses, or lilies and not feel the weight of her ashes against my chest.
It is a lot to lose. Both of our potential lives.