About a Boy By Tara Badstubner

Ask me how I came to write of loss and grief. Ask me at night when I’m especially tired, when my guard is down, when my heart is heavy from the slow grind of the day. I will tell you a story, maybe, about a boy, a friend, who was goofy and kind. His gait reminded me of a penguin, feet slightly turned out, Chuck sneakers always. His fringe of brown hair falling into his eyes and that one quick motion, that backward tilt of his head. I will tell you how he made me laugh, my first indication at age fourteen of how to win my heart. He won it so quickly. I will tell you how he called me from his job at Blockbuster as he checked out videos, the phone pinned between his shoulder and cheek, the long tangle of cord following him as he talked to me between his moments with customers. I’d hear him say, “That one’s especially good, have a good night,” as he handed off the video to the customer. What did we talk of? For hours? It seems impossible how easy conversation was with him, over thirty years ago, but it was, it was so easy.

I will tell you how thirteen days before my sixteenth birthday, I began to receive letters in the mail. Letters, as in the letter H on Sunday. The letter A on Monday. The letter P on Wednesday. You get the gist. All written in crayon, big block letters, until the message was complete: HAPPY BIRTHDAY! He always reached for the obvious and turned it inside out, somehow making it sparkly and new. I will tell you about a boy with a pet named Rabbit, Rabbit. A boy who did cartwheels in the sea, who made mix tapes for people he hardly knew, who painted with only the color orange because it made him happy. A boy who cried, sometimes, and asked me to keep his secrets.

I kept them, I did, and he kept mine. Am I giving them away now, all these years later? If I tell you how lovely he was, am I giving his secrets away? No, but I am giving up mine.

I will share a hard-earned truth—that linear timeline of grief? I’m sure you know it: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance? It’s a lie. A lie spun by some Type A personality that needed grief to be finite, a thing conquered and then left behind. Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “Change Curve” theory was hijacked and turned into something she never intended: slick and lacking nuance. Originally envisioned for her terminally ill patients grappling with declining function and death, she acknowledged that loss and its resulting grief are a fluid experience, unique to each person, without a map or a destination. Kübler-Ross said, “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it.” Somehow this crushing yet vital message is absent in the diagram of grief. Instead, there’s a tantalizing narrative that a distinct, direct path cuts through the land of heartbreak. But this is spin, misdirection. In fact, Kübler-Ross would be the first to suggest that there is no backward glance with grief, not really. It is there to greet us further down the road, again and then again, often when we’re on the cusp of forgetting how much losing hurts.

There are those who might think: dear, it’s been years and this is your best? So much time has passed. You should be long over it. I have a thought or two on this. A strange hierarchy of grief exists in our consciousness, one in which we tolerate degrees of grief according to one’s biological proximity to the deceased, such as the parent or the sibling. But consider the difference in what we permit a girlfriend versus a wife? It’s as if there are discrete units of grief divvied out to individuals when a loved one dies. Here’s your package, brother. And grief hands him a thick, dense bundle. But the girlfriend? Well, hers is considerably smaller. A hierarchy barely acknowledged but, nonetheless, felt. It shapes our grief and its expression, often adding a hefty layer of shame, so we tuck it away and hide it, but it never goes away.

I am fifty-two now. I have children and a loving husband and there’s been a wide breadth of living. But just a few months ago, while I was out driving, a song came on that always reminds me of the boy. I burst into tears as if it were all just yesterday, as if I was eighteen once more, a September day, a late afternoon when the phone rang and I answered it. I was transported back to the moment I learned he was gone. No healing, no bargaining, no acceptance, no time passed at all. How I howled.

For the next two nights I waited until my family was preoccupied with their television show, their homework, their sleep. I slipped out into the dark autumn night, got into my car, drove down the rambling roads near my house and cried, a different cry, a new cry from the one when I was just eighteen. Knowing he was not out there, somewhere, experiencing the little triumphs and defeats, a full life, undid me. But then, on the third night, as if by magic, it left me, the tears all spent. This extraordinary heaviness and missing, gone. It will return, I’m sure, when I’m eighty or one hundred or possibly fifty-nine. Who can say? I’ll howl once more for him and for myself— this weight I’ve carried for so long.

Several years after he died, I dreamt of us. Teenagers once more, roaming Boston Common on a bright, spring day. His slow ramble, never in a hurry, wearing his oversized t-shirt and tugging at its hem. That strange tic of his. We sat on a metal bench, the warmth of the sun on our shoulders, and watched the pedestrians go by. I told him how much I missed him. I said things I’d never had the chance to say. He hugged me, then got up and walked away, that funny penguin walk as he disappeared into the crowd.

Ask me how I first came to know grief. Ask me now, now that I understand there is no map for the living, no destination, no arriving. Ask me and I will tell you a story about a boy.

—

Tara Badstubner lives in beautiful Pennsylvania with her husband, children, and several silly dogs. She’s a former Artist-in-Residence for BookGardan and Hewnoaks, and someone who has spent decades studying her craft. Every Room Remembers is her debut novel, available on September 25, 2026. A story of hope and reclamation, it will resonate with mystics, romantics, and those who experience the powerful undertow of memory and loss. She can be found at: tarabadstubner.com

EVERY ROOM REMEMBERS

A Ghost Story for the Living

After losing her husband Wyatt to a sudden accident, interior designer SJ Monroe believes she is alone with her crushing grief. But nothing is further from the truth. Wyatt, a ghost trapped in a liminal state, must watch in silence, unable to help, as the woman he loves rattles around their unfinished farmhouse in Sleepy Hollow, New York. He mourns all that remained unresolved in their marriage – the children they never had, the depression that stalked him, and the fractures in their relationship.

Over the following months, SJ survives, aided by the company of Wyatt’s dog, Hawk, and nightly drives to Wendy’s for her habitual fry and chocolate shake. She marshals the courage to take a restoration job for the historic Osprey House in her hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina. A vigilant Wyatt follows as she reconnects with family and finds new friends. Signs from the natural world urge her forward. But not everyone wishes her well. While trouble looms, an ever-watchful Wyatt resolves to find a way to speak to SJ from beyond the grave – to tell her to abandon the grief and guilt consuming her, and to claim her happiness. Will she hear him?

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing