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The road up to the crematorium is long, curving round the memorial gardens that are currently being pelted with rain so thick that the petals droop under the weight and the birds overhead frantically seek shelter. With each step forwards, Avery feels the gravel underneath his black dress shoes, their uncomfortably rigid soles forcing him to tense the arches of his feet as he walks. The only umbrella he owns is bright green, so all that protects him from the rain is the dark hoodie covering the slightly too tight suit that he hasn’t worn in years.
Hunching into himself, Avery keeps his eyes on the floor. He doesn’t want to look up and see the modest building, well-maintained with plants and poems and signs of life that offer no comfort to the people who mourn here. He doesn’t want to catch up with the last few stragglers entering the crematorium, all similarly dressed in black, with faces he doesn’t recognise and tears that feel too private for him to encroach upon.
This is Derek’s family.
These are the people who, if not loved, then at least knew him. Avery glances up and sees an older couple, the woman weeping, the man sadly shaking his head. A little way away from them, a mother tries to wrangle two children, one of whom seems insistent on changing into a spiderman t-shirt. A group of people of various ages, who look so different that they can’t possibly all be related to one another, gather hands in a circle and bow their heads in some form of quiet, communal prayer.
And Avery stands on the sidelines, pressing his fingernails into his palms. Holding himself in the anticipation of pain that never breaks through the numbness keeping him disconnected from the world. People step through the crematorium doors until only the funeral celebrant stands outside, looking at him sadly, expectantly.
Avery looks up at the sky. The long, wide, shitty sky, with raindrops falling fast and fat into the wet of his eyes, but he does not even blink. He feels stuck here, searching for some kind of answer that will make all of this make sense. Although he sees the same world that Derek saw, it does not feel vast or beautiful; it feels tired, the same combination of atoms and numbers and letters rearranged to give the illusion of nuance. This world – Avery’s world – is made large by emptiness.
Thirst scratches at the back of his throat. He drank a full glass of water to stave off the hangover this morning, but it keeps returning to him like a bad bout of nausea. Suddenly self-conscious, he wipes the crust from the corners of his mouth and purses his lips to wet them, finally acknowledging the celebrant with a nod and dropping his head back down before heading inside.
He takes a seat at the back, struggling to look around him. Here, he’s so close to the pianist that he can feel the vibrations of the sad, slow song pulsating around him, almost in time with the muted sobs from the people in front. But to Avery, it’s all just noise – static noise itching around the bubble that prevents him from engaging with grief, or people, or life. He bows his head and wonders if he should pray.
He’s never been particularly religious. The crematorium is a lot humbler than the churches he has attended in the past for weddings and the occasional funeral. Its smallness and intimacy only add to the feeling of being surrounded by an observant god. As he thinks of Hastur, and what he put Derek through in the months before his death, Avery flinches, shaking the memory from his mind.
How pained Derek’s typing had been.
How Avery does not know what his voice sounded like.
How, despite this, the sound of Derek dying in pain has been looping in his head for the past three weeks.
The piano music stops as Avery takes a shaky breath to steady himself. The celebrant shuts the doors, leaving him thankfully sitting alone in the back row. She walks down the aisle with practiced sobriety; her hands folded in front of her as she passes the seated mourners slowly. When she gets to the front, she stands at a modest wooden pulpit and addresses the room.
“We are gathered here today to celebrate the life of Derek Hutchins,” she says. In her hands, she holds a folded A5 pamphlet which Avery realises is the order of service. There’s one underneath his seat too, and he reaches down quietly to take it.
On the front, there’s a photograph of Derek. It’s not any of the old pictures that Avery has seen online in the past few weeks, like the photos from his high school graduation or the highlights from various awards in news articles, which tapered off around five years ago and never returned. This is the first picture that Avery has seen which depicts Derek as he was when they met.
There’s light in his eyes. He’s smiling, clearly taken off guard by the photographer. It must have been in summer because the light is warm and clings to his shoulders, creating a soft, golden outline. He’s sitting on a chair in the grass, pointing at something in the distance with his cane. He looks… happy. Inspired. Whoever took this photo must have loved him very much to know exactly when to click the camera and capture Derek at his most peaceful.
Avery traces his fingertips over Derek’s smile, closing his eyes and blocking out the sound of the celebrant finishing her opening words. He feels sick. He knows that he’s here for closure, to learn about Derek so that he can honour him, but he can’t bear the idea of being flooded with information about him in every eulogy if just the image of his face is enough to shallow his breaths and clam up his skin.
And yet, he must accept the information. Like Derek did.
With this, Avery becomes flooded with the same self-hatred that stole twelve hours from him on New Year’s Eve. A dissociative, disgusting thing, simple in all that it is – the knowledge that he is so much less capable than Derek; so much less worthy of being alive. Why is he the one still here?
He can’t imagine that this many people would turn up to mourn him.
Trying to keep himself together, he turns the order of service over so that he no longer has to stare at the picture of Derek. It details the sequence of events that have been deemed appropriate to contain the celebration of a life into an hour-long ceremony. The first entry – Welcome and Opening Words – is already coming to a close as the celebrant steps away from the podium and a woman from the front row rises unsteadily to take her place.
This must be Poetry Reading by Nichelle Hutchins. Although it makes Avery feel better to have a list to follow in order to ground himself through the service, he doesn’t know if he can bear what is about to come.
This is clearly Derek’s mother. She looks too young to be grieving the way she is, held up by two other women as she stumbles to the front of the crematorium. Her wails are animalistic, unburdened by pride. How could they be? She has lost her son. This is beyond the rules and routine of the world. Avery cannot imagine creating something, sacrificing body and mind to nurture another life into the best it can be, and then losing it. Losing the only part of you that breathed without you. It must feel like losing your lungs.
He knows that he does not deserve to look at her. And yet he does anyway, wishing desperately to give her whatever remains of his own strength.
She looks over at the casket and falls to her knees. Crawling, howling, she shudders over to her son and pulls herself up. And then, in a moment of what looks like complete bliss, she places her hands inside the casket and moves them like she is fixing Derek’s collar and brushing his hair from his face. When she leans down to kiss him on the forehead, her weeping begins again – this time quietly, her body shaking violently in contrast to the small sounds she is making.
One of the women who helped her stand earlier whispers something in her ear, rubbing her back and taking a piece of paper from her. She steps up to the podium and, with a steady voice, begins to read the poem Nichelle chose.
“Matthew You’re Leaving Again So Soon,” she says, leaning into the microphone after the first few words so that her voice carries better across the rows of mourners. “By Matthew Siegel:
please take these pens I have all these pens
for you with all the caps on them and pen holders
I have all these pen holders large and plastic
I know they won’t fit in your bag I’ll mail them-"
The poem is short, simple, devoted. Though the woman speaking is not Derek's mother, she must have known him enough to cry for him as one. She wipes her tears and still speaks clearly, echoing somebody else's words: a poem in the voice of a mother to her child, a desperation to give and keep giving. To not be left behind.
She looks back at her… friend? Avery doesn’t know what relationship this woman has to Nichelle, but they’re clearly close, and the semantics don't matter now. She probably watched Derek grow up, and here she is, offering her voice as a vessel for her friend to conceptualise her howling grief. Avery has nobody like that.
Her voice cracks on the final stanza.
“-you used to cling to my ankle and I would
drag you across the floor please
pack me in your suitcase take me with you.”
She solemnly folds the paper over and immediately returns to Nichelle, picking her up and holding her arms, wiping her brow, kissing her on the cheek. The three women huddle together like they are each other’s only defence, the front row versus the cold casket.
Avery looks back at the order of service. Next, it’s Personal Tribute by Madeline Hanford.
He recognises the woman who takes to the pulpit from the group of mismatched mourners comforting each other outside earlier. She’s younger than Nichelle but older than Derek, either in her late thirties or prematurely wrinkled by a difficult life. Her hair is dyed pink at the ends, but there’s little light in her eyes.
“There’s no-one on earth like Derek Hutchins,” she says. With a small smile, she briefly closes her eyes as though recalling a fond memory. When she opens them again, she looks sadly at Nichelle before fixing her gaze on the rest of her group, sat in the second row from the front.
“There won’t ever be again. Sometimes, you meet someone and you just know that they’ve lived a hell of a life. That’s how I felt when I met him, this wicked-smart kid with a sailor’s mouth and an answer to everything. He could fix anything you gave him and would never let you throw away something and buy a new one if he thought he could get it working again. You’d learn within two weeks of knowing Derek that you couldn’t vent to him about a problem without him relentlessly pursuing a solution.”
This gets a laugh from the rest of the crowd. Avery feels a pit in the bottom of his stomach. Derek touched all of these people’s lives; he helped them all in different ways, and Avery is the person he chose to die for? That’s the best solution he could come up with?
“He did so much even before we met. He championed his school in competitions and won a full-ride scholarship. He pioneered new ways of doing things and was cited in PhD-level publications before he even turned eighteen. I think everyone here will probably have a private memory of learning something new from him.
And the thing with Derek is, once you knew him, you knew him. He was in your life whether you wanted him or not. He was persistent, stubborn, annoying as hell. He didn’t let shit knock him down. He didn’t give up even when life dealt him a hand that would crush most people.”
Avery feels voyeuristic for knowing what she’s talking about. Around the same time as Derek stopped gaining minor online attention for his robotics achievements, his father was arrested for a car crash caused by drunk driving. The unnamed passenger was reported to have sustained major injuries compared to the perpetrator’s minor ones.
“A year after we met, I was really struggling to stay sober,” Madeline says. She clasps her hands together and looks back over at her – and Derek’s – friends. “I’d all but made the decision to start using again. And I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want them to worry; I thought I could bounce back after a planned relapse on my own.
But Derek knew. I missed our monthly dinner reservation, and he was there at my apartment, the same night. He brought takeout and a change of clothes and just sat with me on the sofa for hours, talking about anything that came to mind. I’ll remember that night forever. When I thought I couldn’t carry on, he held me and let me cry until dawn.
He stayed with me for twelve days. For twelve days, he didn’t leave my side, dragging me out of the house to get groceries and showing me a new movie every night. He taught me how to cook his mum’s recipes, cleaned my house, read me poetry at night. They were the best twelve days of my life.”
She pauses for a moment, looking back at the casket. When she resumes speaking, her voice is thick with tears. “Derek Hutchins, without you I would never have achieved my five years. And I don’t know what to do without you around. I don’t know who to call when my fridge breaks. I don’t know who to text my Wordle score to. We have a dinner reservation next week.”
With a deep breath, she addresses the entire crowd of mourners. “There’s one thing he’d want you all to know. The same thing he told me every day for twelve days. It doesn’t end here. Your story doesn’t end here. You can stay for as long as you have to, but there’s more waiting for you when you turn the page. Derek, you taught me that this world is wide and beautiful and waiting for all of us. So, for you, I’ll go and chase it. For you, I’ll go out and discover all the stories that I can’t wait to tell you when we meet again. I love you so much that I won’t numb this life, even though it doesn’t have you in it anymore. I love you. I love you. I love you.”
Avery can’t feel that his face is connected to his body. He feels the quick cooling of tears against his cheeks but does not understand how he is crying without moving, and can only hope that he is doing so silently. He feels bitter and jealous, and hates himself for it. Derek and Madeline must have gotten each other through hell, and Avery has no doubt that his immense kindness was returned to both of them by the group of friends who now comfort Madeline in the second row. How can it possibly be that Derek had such a rich life, had overcome so much? How can a man like that – a man who would refuse to accept that life is anything but fixable – choose to die in place of Avery?
Avery, who does not appreciate life. Avery, who feels disgustingly guilty for hating those who do. Avery, who actively does not want to be alive.
The celebrant invites the audience to share a moment of collective silence as Musical Tribute (I’ll Be Seeing You – Billie Holiday) begins to play. The song washes over Avery, warm and placelessly nostalgic, filling all of the parts of him that didn’t know Derek with the information he has learned. Derek Hutchins was kind. Derek Hutchins faced impossible adversity and chose every day to live anyway. Derek Hutchins thought that this world was a beautiful place worth fighting for.
Avery does not relate to him, but oh, how he loves him.
The lyrics pull grief upwards from his stomach into his throat, choking him as he considers what it would be like to see Derek everywhere. This, he knows, is very possibly the reason he has been shutting himself away from the world and the experiences it provokes. He is already constantly confronted with reminders of a man he never knew, and now – having had his mind expanded not by some cruel god, but by the perseverance of love in community – he knows that he cannot go back to a world in which Derek Hutchins did not permanently change him. He will see him in the chestnut trees, the wishing well, every lovely summer’s day like the one immortalised in the photograph on the order of service.
The song ends, bringing with it the penultimate event outlined in the order of service, the one that Avery’s eyes have barely been able to read in full until now, when the terrifying moment has finally arrived.
Candle Lighting Ceremony – Final Viewing
The pianist begins to play once more. Nichelle and her friends stand up first. Avery does not know how she has managed to compose herself, but to her eternal credit, she lights her candle unaided and then stands next to Derek’s coffin, one hand on the wood, the other holding out her flame. Her friends light their candles from hers, and then – one by one – people begin to leave their seats and walk to the front of the crematorium, placing candles around the coffin and having the last one-to-one moment they will ever get with Derek Hutchins.
Some weep. Some hold his hand, lay their head briefly over his chest. Some lean in, whispering an inside joke, and chuckle before wiping away a tear and tearing their faces away from their friend.
Others stay quietly seated.
Every impulse within Avery is screaming that he does not deserve the privacy or closeness that Derek’s friends and family are having with him right now. All the social anxiety that has built up over his life is for this purpose – to keep him sitting here, to allow them to grieve, to not be greedy after all he has already taken.
But his legs move anyway.
Being right at the back, he’s the last to reach the coffin, a fact he did not really comprehend until he is standing there with only Nichelle and the body of her son. He hesitates, wondering if it’s too late to turn back without looking down, or if he’s permanently ruined the last beautiful moment that she will ever have with her boy.
She rests a hand over his. “Go on, sweetheart,” she says. “Don’t regret not saying goodbye.”
Her kindness in the face of the impossible is, in this moment, Derek living on through her, telling Avery that it’s okay to want more than he’s been allowed to have. To need closure and to take it with both hands and all the force still keeping him alive.
He looks down.
The first thing he thinks is: Oh, he’s beautiful.
And then: Not sleeping – dead. See how it comes into focus?
In stark contrast to the sunlit life beaming out of him in the photograph, Derek here is very visibly lifeless. The morticians have done all they can to bring colour back to his skin with makeup, to shroud the deflation of his lychee eyes behind thin, sallow eyelids, but there’s only so much they can do with the corpse of a man who spent months wasting away in front of a screen before he actually died. Instead of being surrounded in sunbeams and gold, he seems to be buzzing with a sickly, bruised yellow, hovering around his skin – as if Hastur cannot leave him, even now.
Avery tries to hold Derek’s hand, but it’s stiff and the fingers will not move. This sends a shiver down his spine, but he does not flinch back – he refuses to flinch back – and instead he rests his hands on top of Derek’s rigor-mortis prayer.
“Thank you,” he whispers. And then the rest of it – the bit that should stay unsaid – spills out of him like blood through a puncture wound.
“I love you.”
The sob in his throat contains itself until the exact moment that Avery turns his head away, at which point it dawns on him that he has seen Derek for the first and last time, and the grief spills out of him. Ashamed and aware of himself, he tries to stifle the noise as he heads back to his seat but feels a hand on his arm, pulling him into the second row.
It’s one of Madeline’s friends, silently instructing him to sit with them. Avery’s knees feel weak and he has no choice but to sink down into the empty seat, eyes fixated on the closing of the coffin. He feels himself shaking as the bubble of numbness pops and everything he has been holding in erupts like a geyser.
He cannot see past his tears to place who is comforting him, but someone has their arm around him and someone else is holding his hand. Determined to see this through until the end, he silently thanks them with a nod and wipes his eyes, watching as the casket rolls behind a curtain to the beginning notes of Closing Music (Derek’s favourite song: Enjoy the Silence – Depeche Mode).
The woman with the two children, one of whom is now somehow wearing the spiderman t-shirt he had insisted upon earlier, is the first to leave. She bows her head before ushering the young boy and girl down the aisle and out through the doors opened by the celebrant. In doing this, the containment of grief breaches into the outside world, and more people stand up, linking arms and heading back out to continue their lives.
The rush of air into the room hits Avery with a shiver. The vague mumble of conversations turns the crematorium from an active place of mourning back into a mere building. He keeps his head down and his hands on his knees until he hears Madeline saying his name.
“Avery?” She asks.
He looks up.
“Are you Avery?” She repeats.
He nods, stunned.
“Here,” she takes something out of her pocket, placing it into his hand and closing his fingers over it so that whatever this object is, it isn’t visible to anyone passing them by as they leave. “Derek left a note saying to give this to you. I wouldn’t feel right not honouring his dying wish.”
His dying wish? Avery clams up at the thought that everyone here doesn’t really know what happened to him. He hates to think how Madeline must be judging him, thinking that her best friend – whilst actively dying from some form of sudden brain haemorrhage – left her only an instruction to pass along something to a man she never met, or even heard him talk about.
Or do they think that Derek – who saw potential in everything and everyone – killed himself?
Avery doesn’t ask, he just looks up at Madeline for confirmation that she hates him and finds only kindness in her eyes. She smiles at him the way Nichelle did, the way people must do when they love someone who remains an enigma to them. The impact that Derek has had on the people around him is so immense that it has brought them closer to one another and made them more compassionate towards the world.
The thought of Derek’s love persevering in this way gives Avery enough strength to stand. He thanks Madeline, still keeping his hand clutched around the smooth, circular object. Looking ahead, he leaves and walks down the winding path, away from the crematorium in the direction of an apartment that he might even try and clean up a little tomorrow.
It’s only when he’s far away from everyone and alone again that he feels comfortable enough to look at what is in his hand. It’s a custom gold coin, engraved on one side with the letters D.H. and a picture of a sunrise. On the other, it says: ONE YEAR SOBER.
Avery looks up at the sky, where the rain has stopped and the birds are returning to the trees to dry their wings and begin again.