It has been a year since Edward passed, and I have learned that grief is a kind of disease for which no cure can be found. On the days when life and its living proves harder than usual, I feel his absence all the more. There is no comfort from his embrace, no soothing from his voice.
To keep from drowning in the silence, I agreed to help my friend Phil when she called, whispering, “I need your help — Ryan and I are throwing a tiny engagement party. It’s a surprise, don’t tell a soul!”. I threw myself into the work, buying pink and gold balloons, fairy lights, and silk flowers. The party was set for a beautiful resort, so I booked a flight, hoping the change of scenery would help.
The flight, however, was a test of patience. Two rows ahead of me in business class, a man was UNBEARABLE. He yelled at a mom with a crying baby, snapped at the flight attendant, and even threw sauce at her. It wasn’t until a 14-year-old boy stood up to him that the man sat down, quiet and humiliated. That boy’s quiet courage reminded me of something I’d read online: Social media isn’t just a highlight reel. Sometimes, it’s a modern-day village looking out for us.
I didn’t know it then, but I was about to become part of a village myself.
Upon arriving at the resort, I found a young woman sobbing in the hallway outside her room. Her name was Sammy. She told me, “The first time I met my mother-in-law Martha she made it clear she hated me… She actually said I stole someone else’s husband and that I wasn’t worthy of Dean like his ex, Kate, was”. Sammy was devastated because Martha had just shown up at her door days before the wedding, smirking, “Dean should be at your house for dinner right now… But he’s not having dinner with me. He’s having dinner with Kate.”.
As I comforted Sammy, two others approached us. One was a man named John, holding a crumpled letter. He told us, “I lost her 13 years ago… My wife left and took our daughter, Harriet. Called me a failure… I’d just lost my job”. He had lived with a hole in his chest until yesterday, when he opened his rusty mailbox and found an envelope from Harriet asking him to come to this very resort.
The other was a woman named Sandy, who was shaking with rage. “Since my son moved out, we’ve drifted apart, so I decided to surprise him one weekend,” she explained. She had found a poster congratulating him and an unknown girl on their wedding, but when she tried to enter, her son came out, denied knowing [her], and instructed security to remove [her].
We realized all our stories were connected by a web of manipulation. Sandy’s son was marrying a woman named “Jenna.” John’s ex-wife, who had dumped Harriet for a “perfect son,” was also named Jenna. And Martha? She was trying to force Dean back to Kate, who was likely part of the same toxic circle.
“We are the village,” I told them. “And we aren’t letting them win.”
We split up. I went with Sammy to Dean’s room. We burst in, ignoring Martha’s shriek of “I told you. You were never supposed to be here”. Dean wasn’t having a romantic dinner with Kate; he was being berated by her and his mother. When he saw Sammy, he pushed past them. “That’s why they divorced,” Sammy had said of Kate’s cheating, and Dean remembered it well. He took Sammy’s hand and told his mother to leave.
Meanwhile, John and Sandy went to the ballroom. They found Jenna—the woman who had divided inheritances into categories: “Car, investments, vacation” and told her partners, “If you love me, you’ll invest in us”. She was about to marry Sandy’s son.
John stepped forward. Harriet, who was there as a reluctant flower girl, ran to him. “I realized that while she birthed me, Grandma was the one who saved me,” Harriet had written, but now her father was here to save her too.
Sandy’s son, seeing the commotion and the evidence of Jenna’s past scams, finally woke up. He called off the wedding. Jenna fled, just like she had when another fiancé caught her and she called off [the] wedding out of nowhere.
That night, the “village” gathered for a real celebration. We had stopped a scam, reunited a father and daughter, and saved a marriage.
I walked out to the balcony and looked up at the stars. I whispered to Edward, “Thank you.” I knew that every day i walk this earth, i am proof that [he] was here. In memory and dream I am returned to you, returned home. And in the laughter of my new friends, I knew that in the memory of my heart, our forever continues.
