[COMPLETE]
When Hanna Haddad embarks on what's supposed to be another uneventful summer as a lifeguard on Cape Cod, a trip to the past comes as an unnerving surprise. The discovery of her estranged mother's journal opens up the world of tragedy and...
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By the age of twenty, I had been to more funerals than weddings.
The absolute numbers weren't that impressive—three funerals and zero weddings. The first depressing event, over twelve years ago at this point, had honored my great-grandmother and my namesake. Had I known the woman or even seen a photo of her before I had made the five-thousand-mile journey to commemorate her life? No, but that still hadn't stopped a precocious eight-year-old me from wanting to tag along my mother's trip to Syria and catch a glimpse of a culture that was supposedly also mine.
Instead, I had earned myself a week of wailing and black clothing, seeing nothing more than the intricately designed sitting rooms of my great-grandparents' home lodged somewhere deep into a hilly village I couldn't even point out on a map at this point.
The second funeral had been that of my middle school art teacher at sixteen. I didn't even like art—actually, I sucked at it—but when I'd learned that most of my old friends and classmates from that era had planned to pay their respects, I'd dragged Stella along to honor the legacy of a woman who had all but told us we were a shame to the artistic world.
The third funeral should have never happened.
I'd always heard that parents should never have to bury their children; that the opposite scenario was only natural. But whether it was how God intended death or how humans had come to conceptualize it, there was nothing natural about standing before my father's casket, white flower in hand.
A noncompliant petal slipped from my shaky fingers as mourners waited for me to bow and toss it onto the casket and put an end to another pointless ritual. Still unmoving, I watched the white petal sink to the earth in slow motion, wishing I could morph into something so small and negligible and simply blow away with the cool late-August breeze.
I collected what was left of myself and bent down to pick up the petal, not realizing the rest of me would fall with it, onto grass damper than my cheeks. Allowing me a few moments to silently grieve, my mother and Benjamin flanked me and pulled me to my feet, stiffening with my silent sobs as the priest finished the last of this frigid commemoration of my father's life.
I kept the petal with me for the rest of the day, only wondering why instead of belonging to the wedding bouquet I'd carry as my father walked me down the aisle, it was marred with a few specks of dirt, the forever resting place of his body.
By the last prayer of the day, I could still say nothing of Nicolas Haddad's soul.
***
I plucked the last blade of grass stuck to my knee as I sat on my living room couch, the center of attention of an event I hadn't signed up for. At least, I was prepared for it, drawing up memories from my great-grandmother's funeral to figure out how to deal with the small crowd of relatives, close friends, and neighbors hovering around my Cape Cod home, all there for the silently mourning twenty-year-old.
