Free Your Song by Gina Elle

Maple Leafs’ games and adios to the monthly poker nights Danny and I used to play with some old friends from high school. When Claudia would call to invite me over, I almost always declined as I did with all the other invitations I’d get from work friends to join them at the pub. My Saturdays with David continued as planned but he didn’t have his regular Uncle Eric with him on those dates, a broken Uncle Eric pretending to be whole was what he got. My relationships with women following the loss of Danny . . . is there a therapist in the house ? Living through grief with Lara, Danny’s fiancé, and watching the toll his death took on her changed the way I looked at love for a long time. Until I met Caroline.
    To watch Lara, a lovely, independent, intelligent woman full of energy and zest for life crumble into a million little pieces was enough to show me that love can be the most beautiful thing you experience, but also the most painful. With Danny gone, the signs of grief etched their way just as quickly in Lara’s world as they did into mine. Right after Danny’s funeral, Lara retreated to the condo they shared in Mississauga’s Square One area and didn’t leave it for weeks afterward. The couch became her lifeline. Whenever I’d stop in to visit, I’d find her in the same sweatpants and t-shirt, hair in a ponytail, and face swollen from crying, lying in a sea of scrunched up used tissues. Watching her whittle to one hundred pounds, gaunt-faced and lifeless further spiraled my own depression. Lara had been given a two-month compassionate leave from her job as manager at a downtown spa.
    I remember spending as much time as I could with her in those first few weeks. Sharing her sorrow, I knew what she was feeling because I was feeling it too. Only, I didn’t lose my short-of-three-days husband-to-be. On what should have been her Hawaiian honeymoon, Lara was mourning the shock of losing Danny and the uncertainty of her own future in a dimly-lit, way too quiet condo that the two of them used to call home.  She had no future; she used to cry to me, without Danny. Her life was hopeless, she used to sob. Cut in half is how she used to describe how she was feeling. Her other half was forever gone and she swore she’d never be the same again.
    How do you console when you are in need of consoling yourself? We were like two zombies walking the dark, the blind leading the blind. For hours, Lara would lash out about the damned tractor-trailer driver speeding carelessly on a ramp, whose own life ended when Danny’s did. She’d talk about the probability of things having gone differently. With thousands of cars driving along the QEW that morning, how was it that the tractor-trailer happened to fall only on Danny’s Acura? What if Danny had left earlier for work . . . what if he had worked from home that day . . . what if they’d gotten married the Saturday before as previously planned but then had to switch the date because their venue had accidentally double-booked weddings . . . then they would have been on their honeymoon and Danny would still be alive?
    My own regrets kept coming back to why I wasn’t home that Tuesday night to take his phone call. If I hadn’t turned my cell phone off that night, then I would have had my last conversation with Danny in person. Instead, while I was in a compromising position in some downtown hotel room with a woman I couldn’t care less about, Danny was saying his last goodbye to me over an answering machine. 
    Grief does that to you. One minute it fills you with absolute disbelief and then the next minute, inconsolable tears. I read somewhere once that grief is what tells you that you’re all alone. With Lara, Mary and Mr. and Mrs. Callahan all grieving around me, I felt I had to be the strong one, the one to keep it together when their worlds were collapsing. I’d listen to them and keep them company but secretly I knew that I was dying inside. I never expressed my sorrow to