Six months. With every sunrise her bones ached a little more.
She was not unhappy. Her grandchildren brought her wildflowers and bread from the bakery she could not walk to on her own anymore, and every Sunday her daughter came with the cart and drove her to the cemetery so she could visit his grave. There was pain, but she could manage it. She made her own tonics with the herbs he had grown in the back garden, now running wild and uncontained in the brilliant heat and sunlight of the living season.
It had been a good, long life. She learned the secret early on: you had to live the whole year round. Too many people only ever learned how to live for one season. They grew accustomed to the wild risks and carefree extravagance of summer and forgot they were no longer invincible when winter came; or they spent all the winter slinking about watching every step, so fearful of their vulnerability that even when summer came they tiptoed through their days as though they would shatter like glass.
But she knew how to live for the full year, and had never let the changing of seasons change how she lived. Until now.
He had died on the very eave of the new year, the last day of winter before the days grew longer, and now she had to wait for him.
She knew the story as well as anyone, and better than most; how many children and grandchildren had she told it to over the years? How the world had once been cold and dark, ruled by long winter, and everything in it had trembled under the shadow of death.
But the goddess of life, a frail and fragile thing in that hard world, had for long ages stood and watched and pined, for the pitiful transience of her domain, for the short sad lives that always flickered out faster than she could create them, for her own loneliness in a terribly lonely world. And so one day she left her hidden country and went forth to seduce Death himself, and took his hand and led him away.
In Death’s absence the world began to wake and grow, and what was once sickly now thrived and thrived and thrived. Too much: the world became overgrown, choked with life that now had no restraining hand, could not stop, could only keep growing until the overabundance became as much a misery as the lack had been. Then all the world cried out for aid, and the gods heard their pleas and demanded of the goddess that she return her captive.
She dared not stand against all her kin aligned against her. But she was a sly one, Life, who knew how to coax victories out of the greatest devastations. She whispered sweet words to Death, and tricked him into drinking from the spring that fed her garden. Having partaken of the waters of Life he became bound to her realm, and though she opened the gates and let him return, he could not stay away forever. So it was that, ever after, there would be a dark season, when the wind blew cold and Death stalked the earth and took what was his; but in time he would always be drawn back to Life’s fair gardens at the end of the world, and the light season came again.
When she told the story, on rainy afternoons or long nights warmed by a fire in the hearth, the children never understood why the people of the world had begged for Death’s return. He was to them a terrible figure, dark and foreboding, vilified in the festivals and ceremonies that accompanied the changing of the seasons.
But she had always thought that Life must have seen something beautiful in him, that she had turned to him in her despairing solitude.
She had seen something beautiful in him. He was her shadow, her other self, with his dark eyes and deft hands and his quietness. All their married life people commented on how different they were, how lively and bright she was, how still and steady he was. He grew the garden while she drew customers to sell their tonics, and when her fair hair turned to white, his dark turned to iron gray.
It had been a good life.
But he had gone on ahead, and while the bright season shone on and on in all its glory, she could not follow.
The pain was not so terrible, nor even the stiffness and seizing that limited her first to the homestead, then to the house, then to her bed more days than not. It was not even the ache of his absence, as keenly as she felt it. But as the days wore on the sense grew in her, beyond all convincing otherwise, that she was not meant for the world any longer. She prepared no tonic, saw no doctor, made no effort to avoid it or stave off the end; when the dark season came her time would be up, and there was no arguing it, even if she had had the inclination to.
All there was left to do was wait out the months. Soon enough, Death would return from his tarrying in Life’s gardens. Soon enough, he would come back for her, and take her hand, and lead her away.