by Ellen Macbeth Boomer

I met grief again on the cross-border train from Dublin to Belfast. This time, it occupied an elderly woman who offered me a “wee sweetie” as she settled into her seat. Most of her bottom teeth were gone: Her two lower incisors sat sentinel amid an expanse of empty gums. The woman’s eyes were rimmed with turquoise liner, and her face was a series of cross-hatches where decades of her sorrows and joys were etched. She and her sister were returning home after a short holiday for which, she said, they’d both overpacked.

I was part of a small group of fellow American writers heading to Queen’s University for immersion in Irish literature and culture. We were heading north after a short stay in Dublin, where we visited sites including Kilmainham Gaol—the jail in which the Easter Rising leaders had been imprisoned and where U2 shot one of their early music videos. Most of our group wrote poetry while I felt comfortable only in prose. It allows me a space to hide.

I’d imagined a peaceful train trip, reading and gazing out at the blurred Irish greenness, but my assigned seat was at a four-top, and this woman started chatting before she’d sat down. Our group leader’s college-aged daughter, Lyda, was next to me and across from the woman. A man wearing a Van Morrison t-shirt sat opposite me with headphones on and his head slumped against the window. His knees kept hitting mine.

Lyda complimented the woman on her nails: bright pink with tiny pearl adornments. “I treated myself,” she said in the round warmth of her Belfast accent. She then said her husband, John, had died just four months earlier. They had been married for fifty-three years. When Lyda asked how they’d met, she leaned toward the woman as she said she’d worked at a petrol station, and John was a customer. She showed us pictures of herself and John on her phone. Her pink nails clicked as she scrolled and tapped, scrolled and tapped. In the photos was a younger and much rounder version of the woman who stood next to a ruddy-faced, robust man.

“It was a mixed marriage,” the woman said, referring to the Catholic-Protestant divide that still infiltrates life in Ireland. Her brother was killed during the height of the Troubles in the 1970s. Grief had been her companion most of her life, and she was trying to regain her equilibrium through small gestures of talking about manicures and sharing cellophane-wrapped candies with strangers on a train. Lyda’s empathy enabled grief to embody the woman. I wish I were as brave as Lyda—engaging with someone’s emotional need with such grace and generosity.

For me, grief first arrived in 2009 when my favorite ex-boyfriend died. In 2016 and 2017, when my uncle and both of my parents died, grief colonized my lungs and heart. I longed for a détente, but grief does not negotiate. Instead, a therapist taught me how to metabolize my losses. As the woman spoke, I told myself that sitting with her in her grief wouldn’t unmoor me, though my instinct was to protect myself.

She talked about how she and John loved singing karaoke. He chose songs by Dean Martin and occasionally, Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” while she liked Doris Day and Patsy Cline. We watched a video of John. In it, he sat on a red leather banquette and held the microphone to his thin lips while he sang with more determination than joy. His sunken cheeks and pallor showed that his body rotted from the inside. My mother hollowed out the same way in the weeks before she died. The woman told us she watches these videos when she misses John, but they don’t make her sad.

“He beat the cancer four times, but pneumonia got him.” Her voice caught when she remembered John’s strength. Neither Lyda nor I said, “At least he’s in a better place.” Platitudes dismiss pain. Instead, we assured her that stories kept his memory alive.

As we pulled into Belfast’s Grand Central Station, our conversation shifted away from John to well wishes about our stay in Belfast. We parted ways, and I realized I never asked her name.

She is John’s wife. She was John’s wife.

I reached into my coat pocket and crinkled the empty candy wrapper, wondering how she’ll balance the weight of living in both the past and present tenses.

Ellen Macbeth Boomer is an essayist who lives in New York City. She earned an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, and her work has been published in Sonder Magazine and Thin Air Magazine. Her essays explore the intersection of grief and memory and sometimes include a dash of humor for balance.