The Time Capsule

No one wants to handle the dead when they may be contagious.

She learned that early on. As the virus spread, her freezers could no longer contain the deceased. No amount of N-95 masks, social distancing and other personal protective equipment could quell the tingle in the throat of her support staff. Most of them quit early on. Too stricken with the stress of catching it. Too worried about those at home they couldn’t bring those types of problems to. She respected their decisions. As an employer, she did all she could for her beauticians, for her facility manager, her fleet manager, and her grounds keepers. She made sure they wouldn’t go under while the country tried to figure out how to move forward. She stayed, of course, because she had no one to go home to anymore—and it was her duty to the dead to lay them to rest with dignity.

The first year of the pandemic passed in a frenzy of inactivity for most of the town dwellers. Her days consisted of finding PPE, preparing bodies, and readying those that couldn’t afford traditional services for cremation. So many donated funerals to families that had perished all together, unaware of the ticking time bombs each of them had managed to catch.

She worked mostly alone with the dead, hoping that her services would return to the normal workload someday soon. And then the ‘someday soon’s started running out. Harvey and Jean were the only people of her staff left. Harvey for cremations, and Jean for reservations. By June of the first year, they’d managed to start a drive through funeral service, so at least people could grieve for those they’d lost to the Coronavirus. By August, the cemetery began running out of graves, and Harvey nearly lived at the funeral home.

By the time they’d been deemed essential workers, she was already experiencing burnout. No amount of Healthcare Hero placards spiked into the lawns of her irresponsible neighbors made her feel better. People were dying, and every day there were more than the day before. By the time the body bags piled up in the basement of the funeral home… she was ready to quit. Her hope had felt as fleeting as the lemon scented soap she used to wash away the smell of death and potential transmission. When she tossed and turned in bed at night all she could think of was how ravaged their insides had been. How there had been no real hope for most of them for making a recovery.

Somehow, she didn’t catch the virus. None of them did. They’d been careful. She attributes her health to the respect she had for those that didn’t make it.

By the time they announced a vaccine, she started looking toward the future, sure that life could finally return to normal. By June 2021, she received notice of a retroactive bonus for healthcare heroes and other essential workers. The Heroes Act had put an extra $60,000 in her pocket. She couldn’t think of much to do with it. She split it evenly with Jean and Harvey, saving her $20,000 for a rainy day like most of the proceeds of her suddenly booming business. She closed up shop and happily let the competition benefit from the casualties of the virus. There weren’t places she felt safe going. Travel had become somewhat triggering. There were no projects she really wanted to complete. The dying were suddenly surviving. And she could finally take time away from work without feeling burdened with duty and obligation.

So, she took time off. She didn’t know how long she’d be gone. But she knew she had to deal with all of the damage the virus had left on her soul.

She tried to forget the atrocities of Covid-19. For the first month of her leave, she dealt with counseling via video chat, cleaning her house and watching the world get comfortable with the success of the vaccines. She added herself to the vaccination list by the start of July, unsure what the rush was now since she followed all the guidelines and kept away from others. By the second month, she’d been convinced that her therapist had no clue how to help her—especially when he’d recommended a homework assignment that honored those she had cared for when the virus had been most devastating.

Dr. Troy had told her to lay her grief to rest. To bury all the things that kept her up at night somewhere and let it go.

She nearly fired him for the lack of creativity. But still, she found herself driving her old truck to the weeping willow tree she sat under at the cemetery on sunny days.

What could it hurt?

She had put a few things inside the box that she kept after a few brutal funeral services. Miss Mayweather’s favorite gardening gloves. Donald Teegan’s purple heart. Jane Finch’s lucky baseball card. Little Ada Prescott’s pretty hair ribbons, something her mother couldn’t take with her after the funeral. Ada had died of an inflammatory disease caused by COVID in children. She had caught it at her mother’s gender reveal party for a brother Ada would never get to meet. All she could remember about the child as she prepared her for service was that the silk ribbons would have looked so beautiful tied into her curly blonde hair; they would have matched the pink in her cheeks that had been turned purple from the swelling. Her mother had insisted on having it down, so her tiny body wouldn’t look as swollen as it had days before.

She refused to take the ribbons back—like the weight of them was just too heavy to carry.

The last thing she put in her box was Jackson’s notebook. It was a little black Moleskine carry along that he took everywhere. He only wrote short things in it, hoping one day he’d collect enough of them to make something worthy of sharing. Jackson Thomas Harrison. J.T., her husband. He’d died right at the start, when nurses were called to the frontlines for a war they were never prepared to fight. He promised her before he left for New York that he’d come back. That he was healthy and could survive whatever COVID threw his way.

He died alone in one of the emergency pop up facilities of a COVID related brain aneurism. It took nearly four months to retrieve his remains. She asked Harvey to cremate him. He refused to let her observe the body. He hugged her outside of the crematorium as Jackson reared in the furnace. It was the last time she’d smell him. Harvey let her cry for as long as she needed, and when her sobs had turned into whimpers, he gave her the little notebook, and later, Jackson’s remains. She scattered them along the coastline as he wanted, trying to understand why life was so unfair life to her.

The box didn’t weigh much… but she hated how final it felt in her hands.

The shovel handle was warm to touch as she broke topsoil beneath the weeping willow. Her pessimism reminding her that this wouldn’t help. That putting a box in the ground wouldn’t rid her of the loss that had been spreading inside her.

It was all too much.

She dug as the sun set behind the tree on top of the hill. She dug and wiped tears and sweat from her face. She dug until the Earth was deep enough to swallow her sadness. The sun was gone by the time she’d piled the dirt back on top of the box at the bottom of the hole, unsure if she should fire her therapist.

---

A few days passed without trouble. She hadn’t quite felt relief. She hadn’t expected it to work at all, really. By the time a week had passed she figured that she had made a good decision, and even mentioned it to her therapist during her final session.

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It took the first torrential downpour nearly three weeks later to change her mind.

Suddenly knowing that she’d left the last of what she had of Jackson’s legacy in the dirt had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. None of the other things inside really mattered. Those other things were other people’s burdens… those other things were laid to rest.

But she would never have that part of Jackson back.

She found herself, hysterical, at the weeping willow tree with her big umbrella as the summer rain pelted down above her, falling between the branches of the tree, and she let the ground reopen for her to correct the mistake she’d made.

‘Clunk’

There was just enough light for her to see the box beneath her. She jumped down into the oddly shaped hole she’d made as it filled with raindrops and regret. She covered the box in her own poncho, pushing the hair from her face as her hands shook with emotions she couldn’t comprehend in that moment. As she ran back to her truck, she prayed that it hadn’t been damaged, that vestiges of him still adorned the pages of that carry along notebook that he used to bury in his back pocket as he left for work each day.

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She drove home with tears sticking to her face. To the sounds of raindrops banging against the roof of her truck. Emotions flooded to her all at once, blaming her for trying to move forward without him so soon. Accusing her of making all the wrong choices. She stripped herself of her wet clothes and sat cross legged on her kitchen floor, the cool tile sticking to her heated body—the box in front of her.

She lay out the baseball card. The purple heart. Miss Mayweather’s gardening gloves, Ada’s ribbons, and finally… Jackson’s small black notebook. They were all covered in dust that seemed too thick to be so new.

The notebook definitely looked different. It was fuller, like the ground had changed it from how she had left it weeks before. As if it had been in her pocket until dogeared and gone through a thousand rebirths in the uneven grave she’d left unearthed back at the cemetery. She opened it to the first page, his familiar handwriting staring back at her:

“This Book Belongs to J.T. Harrison”

“Field Nurse and Author”

She turned each page with fervor, even though she knew what each one said by heart; even though she’d memorized it so that letting it go didn’t mean forgetting. She kept going until the very end, where Jackson had wrote the last words she’d ever read from him, words of reassurance and encouragement; declarations of love and admiration.

Apologies for a future they would not live together.

Tears fell freely down her cheeks before she edged closer to the end. She expected it to be half full—his last words interrupted by breathing tubes and never waking back up. She half expected to wake up then, this nightmare some odd way of coping with her world shattering grief.

But she was awake. Her body began chanting how real this moment was. Her heartbeat reassuring her that she was here, in this moment with a book that had come back to her differently than she had left it.

On the page beside Jackson’s last words was her own handwriting:

Denise,

I hope this finds us at the start. In a place that won’t upset what comes next. It’s not over. There was no other way I could confront myself in Time. I know you will make the right choices. Because I am here now laying to rest our grief, again. Years later and it still hurts losing him. Losing us. It will be all we have.

The next COVID wave is coming. We are not prepared.

May God have mercy on us all.