The Bereaved
By Chris Sharp


Brady was a widower for nearly thirty years.  For each of those years, he dreamt he attended a lavish anniversary party with an empty chair at his side. He didn’t have to tell anyone the person the chair represented.
He had been married to Maureen for over five years, each month of those years finally representing precious old art.  It still didn’t make sense to him that all of this art in a couple’s lives could be destroyed in less than an hour at a stupid traffic accident.
He would stare at Maureen’s dinner chair for prolonged lengths of his widower’s time. He attempted to weigh the larger contents of his warm and orderly times with Maureen and the terrible cold hour of the chaotic accident ending everything.  Minutes before the accident, he was having dinner with her over one of their candle-lit Friday night events in their then wonderful dining room.
They talked about what would qualify as the wittiest Hollywood movie of all time. After a lot of debating and laughing, they agreed the winner would have to be a Cary Grant movie.  But Maureen insisted the funniest had to be “Bringing up Baby.”  With what he believed summoned as great a defense, he championed “Arsenic and Old Lace.”
It was a stalemate, her words against his.  He wanted to drive to the one rental store likely to have both films in stock.  He would play them that night on their TV, one after the other.  Then they would see what movie drew the most laughs, counting even the quietest giggle on a tally sheet.
“You’ve been drinking,” she said. 
“I can drive when I’m only a bit tipsy,” he assured her.  “I’ve had five little gin-and-tonics with solid food.”
“You are clearly drunk and I don’t feel like going out tonight just for a couple of movies.”
“No, no.  Tonight we do the wittiest-movie contest.  Tonight.”
“Brady, I’m not going to let you do it.”
“Madame. We have to do this,” he told her, laughing and finishing his last gin-and-tonic.  “We have to finish this so we can sleep tonight.”
Years later, those words rang out to him.  At the huge traffic accident a little after Brady drove Maureen in his death car, she would never be back to answer any of those jokes and questions again unless --he told himself --  he could somehow join with her in the life after death.
His crazy dreams started almost immediately after the deadly car accident.
Always in these dreams, there would be eight other guests in a family anniversary party.  Two couples would sit on each long side of an expandable table.  At this hierarchal table, the Brady’s parents would sit at the head. Brady and his precious chair that he would carry in and out of each dream would stay at the foot.
There were many chances for Brady to get to know far-flung relatives at these dinners, as the extended family list was lengthy.  The maximum invited each year was twelve guests, as that number was the most the dining room table could seat.  Maureen – represented by her inevitable empty hair –was counted as one of the guests.
The lavish four-course food was served by employees of a catering restaurant.  Brady – the only non-partnered person there – chose in each repeating dream to bury himself in the food and the alcohol.
The presence of the empty chair would always come up in the talk, because it was never to go unnoticed.  At every party the other guests acted as if it would be rude to ignore Maureen’s representation in her wide Chippendale chair.
Brady’s new life – if he could call it “life” – had settled into this frenzied schedule of dreams. He tried to reconcile himself to accountability that this kind of aftermath was deserving of any idiot drunk driver. But accountability was something he learned when everything still made sense. With Maureen no longer with him, he could not count on even the most solid-looking thing staying intact.
In his dreams, the most repeating guest at these parties was an old Yankee who from his claims needed to be nearly two hundred years old. This old soldier always irritated Brady, especially when he talked about Ulysses S. Grant as the best up and coming general in America’s present army command.
“You will be fine,” offered Brady’s mother, who was always there to look after her son just as she had when he was a child. “You need to be strong, Brady. What if Maureen was to appear in that chair this very minute?”
“What my wife did, after I was shot,” said the old Yankee.  This man would always try to dominate these dinners with his account of being shot in his head while he was at breakfast being ambushed at the Battle of Shiloh.  “Only when you’re thinking your wife will never join you, she’ll appear right in the chair next to you.”
“You think Maureen would prefer to be with me today,” asked Brady, “sharing this dream with me at this very moment?”
“No,” and “not so” and “not now,” said the party in a cacophony of responses.  They were laughing as usual at bad jokes; even at the subject of certain departed couples they knew who would be bound to avoid each other on their way to individual lives after death.
The old Yankee gave Brady a solemn look before he asked his question: “Meanwhile, what have you been doing with yourself, young man?”   
Brady allowed two tears on his cheeks to answer the question.  The tear on his left cheek had stopped dead, reminding Brady of the instant he saw his own face on an expired drunk driver.
Then the sliding tear on his right cheek made him think of Maureen still exercising daily and eating the healthiest foods so her mortal existence could go on as long as humanly possible.     


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Chris Sharp has several stories in the archives of Weird Year, Yesteryear Fiction, and Linguistic Erosion. His most-hit stories on the Internet can be found in Google and Bing under “Short Stories by Chris Sharp.”