Next of Kin Read Online Free PDF

it?”
    I looked around at the others in the group: a middle-aged woman with a wide, grim face; a tall, skinny man behind a pair of thick black glasses; a pair of older people that looked like a couple. It struck me suddenly that I knew them all—that every one of the people in this grief counseling session were here because of me, because of someone I had been, their father or their sister or their friend. I was overwhelmed by a sense of loss so staggering that I knew I could never hope to overcome it or escape it. I tried to speak, but nothing came, and I shook my head helplessly. “What is there to say?”
    “Whatever you want,” said Rosie. She tilted her head to the side in a sympathetic gesture. “Who did you lose?”
    “My wife,” I said, repeating what I’d told her before.
    “Would you like to tell us about her?”
    There were so many, both young and old; sometimes I died first, and sometimes they died and left me alone. I stared at the floor, careful not to look at her, and tried to think of something to say.
    I remembered another woman, barely more than a girl, a lifetime ago on the slopes of a great mountain. We lived in a hut of mud and thatch, watching a small flock of sheep on a field of short, stiff grass and twisted trees. She laughed freely, and she worked hard, and she died in childbirth, and I couldn’t remember if I was her husband or if I was her. Maybe I was both, and her parents, and her child. I took so many back then.
    Rosie and the others simply watched me, silent and supportive, giving me time to think before I spoke.
    I opened my mouth, trying to think of a story they wouldn’t recognize, a story Rosie wouldn’t immediately see herself staring back from, but they were all the same: someone left, and someone else was left behind. The world was a broken puzzle, the pieces dumped out in a pile on the floor, close without ever being connected.
    “Is it worth it?” I asked suddenly. I couldn’t get that boy’s words out of my mind. “We spend our whole lives making connections with people who are inevitably, every time and without fail, going to leave us. Unless we leave them first, which might actually be worse. We’re building a foundation that cannot last, with materials that will never hold, and time goes on and mountains crumble and everybody dies, everyone and everything that ever was, and I . . . I am so old.” I felt it then like I’d never felt it before, the sheer weight of my endless, ageless life, as deep and as black as a bottomless pit. It was age that ruined the Gifted—not time, for time was fleeting, but age itself. The relentless buildup of days and nights and days, of waking and doing and being and sleeping, over and over, forever. “Even my memories fade,” I said softly, looking down at the keys on my lanyard, but Rosie stopped me with a single sentence.
    “Do you feel that lasting—that staying, that remaining—are the only things that give something meaning?”
    We’d thought that once, in the beginning. We wanted immortality, and we were willing to give up anything to get it. I don’t remember what I’d given up, but I knew it was a part of me so deep, so central to myself, that I had never been the same person since. None of us had. We had reached for a gift, but we’d reached too far and we had withered instead, like dead vines shriveling in a glaring summer sun.
    “Give meaning to what?” I asked, feeling bitter and empty. “If I give you meaning and you die, what good has it done?”
    “You can’t give me meaning,” she said simply. “It’s not yours to give; I have to do that on my own. Elijah, what has meaning for you?”
    I looked at Rosie, remembering the day we were married, and the long nights we’d spent sick or worried or joyful in each other’s arms. “People,” I said.
    “And what happened when those people were gone?”
    I stared at her, so close I could almost touch her, and my voice came out in a strained whisper.