The Whole Family’s Regret After I Died Chapter 08
When an elf dies, they are dressed in a resting shroud so their spirit can return to the embrace of the Forest Goddess.
Grandpa chose the shroud himself, from a side street behind Silverleaf Town’s burial hall, the oldest resting- cloth shop on the block. He went alone and didn’t bring anyone with him.
When he came back he was carrying a cloth bundle. He opened it: a pale-yellow shroud, small, with a ring of tiny embroidered flowers at the collar and sleeves that gathered in fine narrow cuffs, exactly the color and style I’d always loved.
The finest thing I ever wore in my life was my burial shroud.
Grandpa laid me out on the wooden board himself and changed my clothes himself.
Mom stood in the doorway, hand reaching in. “Out,” Grandpa said, without looking up.
“Dad, let me help dress her. She always hated the cold, I know exactly how to do up the buttons so she won’t—”
“I said out.”
He looked up at last. “You had no right to worry whether she was warm or cold while she was alive. It’s too late to
start now.”
Mom stepped back and slid down against the doorframe, sitting on the floor with her forehead on her knees, shoulders heaving.
Grandpa fastened the last frog closure and tucked my hair behind my ears. His hands were rough with calloused knuckles, but they moved more gently than Mom’s hands ever had when she braided Elena’s hair.
Dad didn’t come inside. He crouched on the stone path in the courtyard.
Elena had been sitting on the long bench in the living room since morning and hadn’t moved. She wasn’t crying. More precisely, from the moment she fainted in the hallway, she hadn’t shed a single tear. She just sat there with both hands in her lap, eyes fixed on the room where I was lying. Occasionally someone would speak to her. She’d turn her head, lips moving, no sound.
On the day of the burial, wind came.
The sky was a uniform flat gray. The sun looked like it was behind dirty gauze, too weak to illuminate anything.
The grave was dug on the hillside behind the Old Grove, next to Grandma’s. A small grave. A small coffin, white oak, sealed with a coat of clear varnish that still held a few fingerprints that hadn’t dried. Grandpa had varnished it himself.
When they began to lower the coffin, Mom rushed forward. Both hands locked around the edges. She threw herself over it, fingernails digging into the wood, and no one could pull her off.
“Let me see her one more time, please, just one more look, I never finished saying what I needed to say-”
Two of my uncles grabbed her by the arms and dragged her back. Her shoes gouged long tracks through the mud. The sounds coming out of her weren’t quite crying anymore, more like an animal that had been caught in something and couldn’t get free.
“Don’t bury her, she’s afraid of the dark, she’s always been afraid of the dark, leave her a light—”
Dad was kneeling at the edge of the grave and made no move to stop Mom. There was blood on his forehead from
the day before, never wiped away, dried in layers and mixed with dirt, plastered across half his face. He stared down at the small white coffin at the bottom of the pit, hands twisting in the earth, knuckles dark with soil, silent.
Then he bent forward and pressed his forehead to the rim of the grave.
“Dad is sorry.”
He said it into the earth, his voice swallowed by the dirt, dull and flat. “You were hurting and I didn’t take it seriously. I don’t deserve to be your father…”
The clear varnish was buried under one layer of dirt, then another, until only one corner still showed, and then that too was gone.
Elena stood beside the mounded earth. The wind had scattered her hair across her face and she didn’t raise a hand
to push it aside. She didn’t cry, not once the whole time.
I was floating above her.
Then I saw it: every trace of the curse had left her body, completely gone.
I stared at that for a moment. Then I laughed.
She’s alive. She actually made it.
In that moment I thought maybe it wasn’t so bad, lying in this hole in the ground. At least I’d traded my life for one person staying in the world.
When the last shovelful of earth was turned, Grandpa reached into his cloth bag and placed the vine-woven shoes in front of my grave.
“I kept Emma’s soul crystal.”
Not a question. Not a negotiation.
Every elf grows a soul crystal inside themselves. Elves believe that after death, a fragment of the spirit lingers in the crystal.
Mom wrenched free from her brothers and came crawling forward on her knees. “Dad! She’s mine, I gave birth to her! You can’t take her! I’ll keep her crystal at home, I’ll cook for her every day—”
“Cook for her.”
Grandpa’s voice had gone cold.
“When she was alive, you never once poured her a warm cup of moonflower tea. Her bowl always had cold rice. And now you’re going to cook for her?”
Mom’s mouth fell open and stayed open.
“You raised her for fifteen years.” Grandpa said it one word at a time. “Fifteen years you kept score against her. You say you want to make it up. What exactly are you planning to pay with?”
Dad shuffled forward on his knees and wrapped his arms around Grandpa’s leg. “Dad, I know I have no right to ask, but Emma is our daughter. She should be somewhere near us. We’ll visit her every day-”
“Move away from me.”
Grandpa looked down at him. “You say she should be near you. But when she was alive, you locked her in the
cellar. You wouldn’t let her near you. You left her alone in the dark to die.”
His voice was unsteady now. “I’m taking her home, to the deep forest. She’ll be buried next to her grandmother. Her grandmother loved her. At least when she’s gone, there’ll be one person who does.”
He bent and lifted my soul crystal to his chest, wrapped it inside his coat, and turned for the hill.
“Dad-!”
“Dad, come back-!”
Mom and Dad threw themselves after him. Grandpa rolled his shoulder and shrugged them both off.
“Don’t touch me.” He didn’t look back.
He was old and couldn’t fly anymore. He carried my soul crystal down the hill on foot, step by step.
Mom and Dad collapsed in the muddy earth beside the grave, covered in yellow soil and bits of grass. Mom convulsed with crying, curled into herself, rolling on the ground. Dad lay facedown, fists hitting the earth, over
and over.
Elena didn’t go to help either of them.
She stood where she was, watching until Grandpa’s shape disappeared around the bend in the mountain path.
The wind picked up.
Slowly she bent forward, bending and bending, until she was crouching beside the grave. Both arms wrapped around her own shoulders, holding tight, so tight, like she was holding onto someone who was no longer there.
