It's only imaginary, but enormously significant: That sliver of a moment when the year changes and time becomes "new" again, in this season of cold and shortening nights. Some of us look ahead, anticipating. Others look back, as fearful of the past as the future. We ponder our indebtedness to the universe perhaps, or consider with gratitude the gifts we don't always deserve.

 

As 2015 begins, I've decided just to let some things go. Not because anyone's life will be improved by it, but because it's simply time. Because the debilitating grief that nearly tore me and some friends apart last year really can't be carried forever. And as I've learned, nor is it meant to be.

 

Fiona was actually her middle name, but she'd started going by it when she was a teenager, maybe to assert her own identity. Her first name was the elegant Martine, which was a name passed around in her family.

 

I met Fiona in 2009, when we both frequented the clinic where, at 22, she was receiving treatment for an aggressive form of breast cancer. A double mastectomy was already behind her. There would be more surgery, and she bravely endured chemo and radiation treatments off and on for the next five years.

 

We forged an odd friendship, based as much in malady as in any common interest. Nearly twice her age, I probably seemed rather paternal. An elementary schoolteacher, she spoke thoughtfully, listened with obvious attention and had an extremely loud laugh. She had the most beautiful gray eyes, which sometimes seemed green.

 

Though the disease in her faded occasionally, it kept coming back. Gradually, she began to show the terrible physical and emotional scars and the drowning fatigue that typify rampant illness, and it became clear her time was growing brief.

 

In February, I saw Fiona on the street downtown. We sat and talked for awhile, and then we cried, quietly, when she told me she had halted her treatment and had only six months to live. She seemed very calm and content, shrunken and exhausted but not diminished by the disease.

 

Before we parted, Fiona asked me to write a poem for her and to read it at her memorial service. Her request was startling, but touched my heart deeply, and I promised I would try to do a good job, which made her laugh.

 

I saw Fiona once again about a week later, in early March. She died the first week of May, just short of her 28th birthday, and her memorial was held a month later in a Quaker meetinghouse near Philadelphia. I read the poem I'd written for the occasion. Afterward, Fiona's younger sister, Margaret, handed me an envelope with a card inside. When I got home that evening, I finally opened it. The card contained a letter from Fiona, written the day I'd last seen her back in March.

 

"I guess if you're reading this, you know what happened!" she wrote. "I really want to thank you for two things. For traveling with me on this journey, and for coming to my wake and reading your poem. I knew you wouldn't let me down."

 

She also asked me to be friends with Margaret, her only sibling, and to stay in touch with her parents.

 

Then she wrote: "I'm not sure how the afterlife works, but I'll help you if I can. Come find me when you get there someday. Maybe there's a map."

 

This past summer and autumn were freighted with a crippling grief I could never have anticipated. Some days, it left me speechless and cold. Other days, I was enraged. Here I was, living on, while this remarkable young woman had suffered so and died.

 

During the summer, my own health faltered again and Margaret and I made many trips to where Fiona's ashes had been scattered. I began writing other poems in hope of finding the seed of this despair and casting it away. In one poem, Fiona and I both have died. In another, I remained among the living. During these visits, Margaret asked me to read these poems aloud, as if to Fiona herself, and I did.

 

I'm not certain how this grief has been transformed, but I do remember a singular moment when it seemed to have lifted, when time seemed to have become "new" again, as we imagine it does every January 1.

 

One night in October, Margaret invited me and another friend to dinner at her house. Margaret had been an opera and choral singer in college and so her world is always full of music.

 

After dinner, Margaret disappeared into her dark back yard. A moment later, from inside, we heard her singing. It was a slow, soft melody, almost like a lullaby, but without words. Instead, her voice keened and swirled into the chilly air.

 

I knew from other times that this was how Margaret talked to Fiona. And in that time and place, Fiona seemed very near, and everything was new again, and it still is.

 

 

 

Robert Rhodes is a poet and artist, and was a newspaper journalist for 20 years. He has written three chapbooks of poetry and the nonfiction book, Nightwatch (Good Books, 2009), about six years his family spent in a Minnesota Hutterite colony. He lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.