Grief's Trajectory

1

Ultimate Betrayal

Dale took a sip of his beer and gave a toast. Life was good. The love of his life had married him. He had been hired to work at by a local contractor. He had good friends to celebrate with. What more could a guy want?

He was out with his two best friends enjoying a day in the park. His beloved Cynthia had not felt well and stayed home. Home was a house they had just rented and moved into. They were still in the middle of unpacking the few boxes that they had. Their living room was empty. They owned a bed, a chest of drawers, a kitchen table and an old couch given to them by his parents. It was not much but they did not care.

They had each other.

Cynthia was the most important thing in his life.

He, Bobby, and Guy were enjoying day in the park. They had a table and a grill stand where the red-hot charcoal was roasting some brats and sausages.

The beer was cold. The day was warm.

He looked past the newly planted young ten-foot-high maples surrounding the picnic area to the towering predominance of a single huge old oak wrapped by its cloak of dark green leaves as it dominated the hill and the host of red, yellow, and pink wild flowers seemly paying homage to it. The white puffy clouds in added a lofty touch of greatness and seemed to be embracing it.

The world was as it should be.

He watched a group of white boys arrive in a large flatbed truck. They stopped at the next grill, and all jumped off and then reached back and helped themselves from a cooler to some beer.

A short time later one of the group demanded that the three of them give up their table.

He figured that they were looking for a fight because no more than twenty feet away was the table that belonged with their grill.

He told Guy and Bobby not to engage. He turned so that he was looking at the large Oak tree in the middle of the field in hopes that nothing would happen.

When he felt a hand on his shoulder pull him around, he knew it had not worked. He hit the guy as hard as he could with his beer bottle, ducked and kicked him on the side of his knee and to took him down.

He was hit on his back with what he knew as a baseball bat because he heard the attacker shout out, Home run.

He fell to the ground and heel kicked the second guy under his chin. He was sure the kick had taken him down.

He lost count of how many times he got hit. The fight ended when a group of folks from some of the other tables around broke up the fight.

He was about as busted up as he had ever been. He was on the verge of passing out.

Guy suggested they get home and get him fixed up.

Bobby threw water on the grill, grabbed their stuff, threw it into the back of the pickup and jumped into the bed.

Guy said he would drive.

He got into the passenger’s seat and that was the last he remembered.

He started to come too as he was being dragged across the grass. He looked up and realized that Guy was dragging him. He started to relax and then something hit him across the sided of his head and the world went black.

He came awake one more time as the rope around his neck tightened and he could no longer breath.

He looked down and was shocked that he was looking at the person that had been his lifelong friend. They had grown up playing together.

Then the world went black.

The lush dark green oak leaves touched by the morning dew rustled quietly in the morning breeze. The gnarled branches of the ancient more than one hundred-year-old oak tree limbs spread out some one hundred feet in diameter and reached up just as high up into the sky.

Its prominent lone location at the top of the knoll made it the strongest oak tree of the forest around it. It heralded its dominance and strength. It had been compelled to battle for its existence from the wind, rain, winter storms and the blazing sun.

Guy had watched it grow for more than fifty years as he battled his mind over his ultimate betrayal of his friend.

He wished he could embrace the righteousness the oak symbolized. For him it emphasized that it would never let him forget the one most immoral event in his life that for more than fifty years had haunted him.

He and the oak had mutually embraced that moment for all those years.

The oak had flourished and grown more than fifty feet in heigh and diameter.

He had killed his best friend in hopes of taking his place in his Dale’s wife’s side.

She had refused his proposal of marriage three times. Then he had learned she was pregnant with Dale’s child.

That day his soul had shriveled, and he wished he could have died. Each year his soul had taken one more step into the grey of despair and regret.

He sat on the Oak bench made from a limb that had fallen from the tree. He had taken the fallen limb to the lumber yard and asked Bobby to make it into a bench and then he had donated it to the park. It had a brass plaque that commemorated his old friend that had been hung from a limb of the oak tree.

He often came to watch the sunrise and to remember. To remember To remember.

To remember so that he could go back to his farm and for another day do the work that would allow him to live the life that he had lived for fifty years. It had been fifty years on his own. It had been a lonely fifty years. He thought of it as his hell on earth.

He had watched as Cynthia had also lived alone but he saw her with her daughter and saw the bright light that the two seemed to exude.

All around him he listened to the forest humming with life. The birds in the oak tree’s canopy chirped and sang