Three times I’ve walked this road. The road to Everwood. Three times too many if you’d ask me. Three times I have seen this rocky path, and three times have I changed walking it.

This fourth time is by far the worst.

Walked it once in the summertime, a mere six years old. Holding a small bouquet of flowers, a mix of roses and lilies. Mom and dad walked with their hands intertwined and only dad held my hand this time. Mommy was busy, daddy had said, mommy had something else to hold right now, even though her hands were empty.

It took me many years before I realized what he meant.

I wear a nice suit, black as always. All those who travel down this road wear black it seems. It’s a fitting color for Everwood. Black is the color of night, the color of shadow, the color that disperses when white light occupies its ground.

Black is the color of death.

Death had become something I understood better when I walked this path the second time. Nineteen I was by now. Nineteen with long hair and acne-ridden skin. Nineteen without a job, an owned home, nor a fancy little high school diploma; all the things my brother had by the age of nineteen. All the stuff he had never talked about because mom and dad were already talking about it. They would swear up and down the wall back then, back when I hid in my room with the lights all out and stared into the abyss as the drugs took effect. They’d talk about how he’s good and he’s great, how he had a wife already, a college degree, and a wonderful life ahead of him.

Mom and dad were wrong it seemed, for when I walked the second time down on the road to Everwood, he had none of those things.

The trek down this time felt steeper than usual. Like walking down a mountain. Easier than climbing, but so much scarier. It occurred to me that now was the time I walked down it again. That now was the time I took this trek down the road to Everwood. That it wasn’t when I signed for the army, it wasn’t when I marched on Washington, it wasn’t on any of these days. That only now, at age 56, do I walk this path. 

That now I must go down the road to Everwood, once again for me, but not hold the hand of my son, who had never walked this trail before.

My father had held my hands the first two times I walked this road. He held it tight, he held it firmly. He held it like it was my life in his hand. That if he were to let go for even a second, a moment’s breath of time, that I would be flung down to the cemetery along with my grandmother and brother.  However, the third time he held me not, for this time I held his coffin. 

It was a heavy coffin, a coffin even heavier when I walked up without it.

I feel discomfort. I feel a sense of despair. A hateful sense of horror tingles down my spine. A deathly and horrific feeling of illness that is trapped within my mortal form. An illness I cannot shake, the type of illness that I have had since I was six, and the type of illness that had changed every time I walked upwards this path.

The illness of fear. The fear of death.

When I walked upwards the first time my mother wasn’t following. My mother had collapsed at the gravestone, the gravestone of her mother. I hadn’t quite understood the concept of death, the concept of endings, the concept of never being alive again back then. 

My sickness however came that day. That sickness was injected as I walked away from my mother screaming and my father holding me tight. That sickness came from the hope that sadness like this would not come again.

My wife wasn’t happy. She frowned and shed tears for the first time in a while. She felt true sadness down this road to Everwood. I could see it in her skin. The type of skin that held brown and tan any other day, but today it looked like a scared sheet white. 

Today was a sad day for her as she walked down this road. For her husband wouldn’t be walking back up it with her.

I stared into his eyes. My heart sunk. He was dead. Truly and forever dead. I had heard of stuff like this and even had experienced it before, but not like this. A gunshot in his head. A gunshot wound was sealed up by the best of the best, but it still wasn’t the same. Nineteen years I spent in loving hatred of this man. For nineteen years he was almost my enemy. And now, I only had nineteen years of knowledge of the man I knew as my brother.

As I walked up the hill, the sickness stirred and I began to choke on the idea of being forever gone.

My son wasn’t happy. Of course, he wasn’t. His father laid in a casket too soon, but not soon enough. Not soon enough where these memories of his own daddy would be just that: memories. But instead, his memories of his father, the man who tried to raise him well, would soon become scars upon his own psyche. He’d have no father today nor tomorrow. A father is gone, a father whose last hugs and kisses were dry and sick. Sick like hell, because cancer has that effect. 

However, never as sick as the illness I got at six. Never as sick as the illness I have just gave my son.

My father died the same way I did. The same place as well. In a hospital bed, with tubes and wires stuck in his breathing corpse. He was dead the day I saw him last, no doubts on that, but we still tried that day. We still tried to save his wretched soul. We still rushed around the office pushing syringes and taking blood samples, checking results, and cursing under our breaths in the end. Like cursing God would change his fate. But I did it anyway because it helped. I cursed as I carried his casket. I cursed as I watched his burial. And I cursed so much when I climbed up the road.

I, much like my illness, began to curse death.

As we descended. As we began to reach the end of this road, my virus went haywire. It shocked every portion of my body, it stuck to every cell in my wretched corpse. I felt it begin to alarm itself, as even when dead I feared the concept of my end. The concept that this body, this form of mine to be buried and betrayed by the world. That everything my life had come to was over. That the life I had lived was drawing to a close and the world began to flashback towards me. Every moment of my life and every second I enjoyed began to fly backwards onto me.

I would’ve smiled if I could, for the moments before the end was beautiful. I would’ve frowned as well, as the moments, in the end, were sad.

I was hateful on my death day, angry. I yelled at nurses, I screamed at god, and my heart began to seize. I was hateful towards all of those around me. Found myself sick and disheveled and not because of the tumor that ate away at me and my body. Voluntarily isolated from the world, away from my mother, my wife, and my son. I found myself running from it all, like seeing them in my final moments would confirm the grim reaper’s reaping.

In death, I had caused this sickness to spread so much quicker.

As the road began to close. As the speeches had been said. As my corpse was dug to the end. I take a sigh. I take solemn sadness. For, in the end, I died. I died the death that many take. The death of those who are sick and afraid. The death of those who hate in the end. 

The death of those who make the road to Everwood so much harder.