The first time I noticed how quiet the plane felt, it wasn’t because the engines were soft or the cabin lights were gentle—it was because grief had a way of muffling everything, like someone had wrapped my ears in thick cloth.
My name is Margaret, and I was sixty-three when I boarded that flight to Montana, carrying a black dress in my suitcase and a kind of exhaustion that didn’t come from lack of sleep but from living through something your body refuses to accept as real. My son, Danny, was gone. Even writing that word in my mind felt wrong, like a sentence that had been typed with the wrong hands. Robert—my husband—sat beside me with both palms pressed to his knees as if he were trying to anchor himself to the seat.
He had always been the steady one, the man who could fix a rattling door, a leaking pipe, a broken toy, a broken plan. He was the kind of husband people pictured when they said, “At least you have each other.” But on that morning, we weren’t “each other.” We were two people sharing oxygen while drowning separately. He offered me water in a voice so careful it sounded practiced, like he was speaking to a skittish animal that might bolt if startled. I shook my head because my throat was desert-dry and somehow still couldn’t swallow. The plane began to taxi, the seatbelt signs chimed, and my hands folded into each other so tightly my knuckles ached. I thought about Danny as a child, how he used to lean against me on the couch and ask questions about everything—why the moon followed the car, why grown-ups cried when they thought kids weren’t looking, why some people got to live long lives and other people didn’t.