There is a woman named Mucha in their group who has lost her six-year-old daughter. She has curly black-and-grey hair, newly creased lines on her skin, and a small silver cross dangling from her neck. She’s speaking now and Steve crosses his arms around his chest. Some other members of the group mirror his posture, holding themselves for comfort or creating a barrier between themselves and her words. “What I don’t understand,” Mucha says softly, “is why she started dying from her toes upwards.” Mucha’s one of the ones who says ‘dead’, ‘dying’, ‘died’ instead of ‘dusted’. “She fell to the ground as her legs went away. She looked at me with fear and confusion. She suffered.”
“I’m so sorry, Mucha,” the facilitator says. He then asks her how the tree she’s planted in her child’s memory is doing.
“It’s sprouted three new leaves,” Mucha says.
This is a distraction technique, Steve knows. He’s watched Sam facilitate groups and he grasps the basics of the process. Distract the suffering person from their unpleasant thoughts with pleasant or constructive thoughts and behaviours. He feels a stab of guilt in his chest; he hasn’t distracted himself with books or art projects or gardening. Instead, he’s become preoccupied with all his ghosts, and everybody else’s ghosts, too.
“Steve,” the facilitator says gently, and Steve tenses in his seat, just a little. There’s an odd sense of irritation now when he hears his own name and when any sort of attention is directed towards him. It’s guilt, he assumes. Guilt and the knowledge that nothing he says is adequate. He has nothing insightful or important to add and could comfortably keep his mouth shut for weeks. “You haven’t said anything yet today,” the facilitator says. “Is there anything you’d like to talk about?”
“I—” he starts, but doesn’t finish. He can feel the others’ eyes on him but his own gaze is directed at his feet. Just like Mucha’s daughter, Bucky’s feet were the first to go. He knew what was happening, he said Steve’s name, looked at him, and Steve looked back but had no words, just like he has no words now.
Sam had once joked that he could visibly see when Steve was repressing things.
He’ll have to try his best. “When my—my partner died, he uh…” He clears his throat and hazards to look up. The others are listening politely with no obvious judgment, so he continues. “No one saw him die. So he was alone.” He looks at Nancy, a young woman whose brother was dusted without witnesses after he went for a walk and failed to return home. Her eyes are red and puffy. “So—so sometimes I dream that he didn’t actually die. That he’s just lost somewhere and I—” Abandoned him?
Steve clenches his jaw shut. When the facilitator realizes he’s done speaking, he thanks him and eventually concludes by saying, “Our relationships with our loved ones haven’t ended. They’ve just been transformed.”
“They’ve just become one-sided,” one man responds.
“If that is what you believe,” the facilitator says, not unkindly.
The group members begin the process of stacking the chairs up and filing out. Steve’s stride matches with Mucha’s and they walk in companionable silence through the rain-soaked parking lot. When Mucha gets to her car, she says, “I tell myself that she is in God’s arms. I tell myself she is in a place of endless blue skies.”
Steve thinks back to the mockingly blue skies of Wakanda. Thinks about the happily chirping birds and the gentle, fragrant breeze on his face as he sat on the ground, hands smeared with Bucky’s ashes.
“I tell myself many other untruths, too,” Mucha continues. “It helps me.”
Steve feels cut open in the face of her candor. He wishes he could bare his soul with the ease some of the others have; he wishes that he wasn’t such a coward. On the best of days his mind feels like a jumbled mess, a massive clump of thoughts tangled together. He doesn’t know the words for what he feels but he does know it’s the same thing he felt in a bombed out bar in Europe, in Times Square in the future, in Sokovia, and in Wakanda. He knows what he’s wanted each time he’s experienced this feeling so he gives voice to that: “I tell myself that I can fix this,” he says, surprised that his voice sounds wet. “And that I can find Sam and all the others and bring them back.”
Mucha smiles a brittle little smile at what she must see as the grandest of delusions. She nods at him once and gets into her car.
Steve walks to the back of the lot to his own car. He sits inside and watches the lot slowly empty until he’s the last one there, sitting in his dark car in the dark lot, the clouded sky an endless black maw above him.
On their very first group session, the facilitator had said that there’s no cure for grief, no quick fix, and that grief is a lifelong process. “It gets easier with time,” he’d said. “I know that that’s a platitude we’ve all heard many times, but it’s true and true things bear repeating.”
But Steve’s had all the time in the world and knows that the cures for grief are death or resurrection, and Steve can’t die with the burden of fixing this on his shoulders.
His hands are trembling just a little this time when he reaches forward to grip the steering wheel. “Okay, Sam,” he says. “That was for you. I said a little more this time. I haven’t talked about Wanda or… or Bucky yet, but that’s my goal for next week.”
He takes some deep breaths. In and out. Again and again, imagining Sam’s voice coaching him through it. After a few minutes, his eyes stop stinging and the tightness in his chest eases by a margin.
He starts the ignition and drives home.