Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [130]
“Yes, I remember the time I was dogsledding in the Norwegian Alps . . . training the team for the Iditarod . . . going hard . . . with the snow swirling in my eyes . . . my lead dog limping but gamely carrying on . . . my face growing numb in the cold . . . and I remember thinking . . .”
Pause.
It’s even better than the “I remember the time I was riding the elephants on my way to ancient Amber Fort in Jaipur . . . the heat beating down . . . the elephant growing weary as we mounted the final crest . . . and I remember thinking . . .” story.
After riding the dogsled, we joined our tour companions under a teepee; inside, they were serving reindeer stew that had been cooked over an open fire. The teepee was smoky, but it was warm and the food was enticing, especially after the morning we’d spent.
Sadly, we were informed that because of the ever-deepening cloud cover, our chance to see the aurora borealis was next to nil; in fact, we would learn that the northern lights had been rare all winter. The chance to see them had been the reason for our visit to Tromsø in the first place, and both Micah and I were disappointed.
We were, however, offered a chance to go to yet another museum, but Micah and I were museumed out by then. Instead, we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the streets of Tromsø, talking and taking in the sights.
“Did you ever wonder why things happened the way they did?” Micah asked, apropos of nothing.
“All the time,” I responded, knowing exactly what he was referring to.
“Most of my friends haven’t lost anyone close to them.”
“Neither have mine. And Cat hasn’t either.”
“Why is that?”
“Who knows. I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.”
Micah pushed his hands into his pockets.
“Have you ever noticed that people think of us as experts on death now? I mean, whenever a friend has someone die, he or she always calls me to talk. Does that happen to you?”
“All the time,” I answered.
“What do you say?”
“It depends.”
“I never know what to tell them. I mean, there’s nothing you can say to make a person stop hurting. Half the time, I just feel like telling them the truth. I’d say that for three months, you’re going to feel worse than you’ve ever felt, and you cope as best you can. And that after six months, the pain isn’t so bad, but it still hurts more than you think it will. And even after years, you still find yourself thinking about the person you lost, and get sad about it. And you still miss them all the time.”
“Why don’t you say that?”
“Because that’s not what people want to hear. They want to hear that it’s going to be okay. That the pain goes away. But it doesn’t. It never does. And you can’t say that when the wound is fresh. It would be like pouring salt in their wound, and you can’t do that to a person. So instead, I tell them what they want to hear.” He paused. “What have all these losses taught you?”
“That it hurts, but you’ve got to go on anyway.”
“That’s what I learned, too. But you know, I would rather have learned it a lot later in life.”
“Me, too.”
“You know what else I learned?” Micah asked.
“What’s that?”
“That it’s a cumulative thing. Mom’s and dad’s deaths were hard, but it’s like when you lose both of them, it’s not only twice the loss. It’s exponential. And then, when we lost Dana . . . it wasn’t like we’d lost three people we loved. It’s like we lost almost everything.”
Micah shook his head before going on.
“After something like that . . . well, even though you try to get through it—and might seem fine on the surface—underneath you’re a wreck, and you don’t even know it. And sometimes, it takes a while to figure out that you’re still struggling with everything that happened.”
I nudged his shoulder. “You talking about me again?”
“No, not just you,” he said. “Me, too. Like you said, we just reacted to the loss in different ways.”
After our sister’s death, Micah changed.
It was as if he’d suddenly become intimately aware of the fragility of life and how precious time really was. As a result, he made