Yahrzeit

Author: xyellowroset

Rating: PG

Summary: Presumes things didn't work out quite so well in 'In the Shadow of Two Gunmen'.

Disclaimer: John Wells writes bad Sorkin fanfic and gets paid for it. I write bad Sorkin fanfic for free.

Notes: Written for Pam's 'Character Death Challenge' Uisge Beatha says I like to kill people off. That's not true. I just happened to be in a weird place where Margaret Atwood, the X-Files, and some research I'm doing at work regarding religious tenets regarding death and dying all coalesced in my brain to create this vignette. ShellySMK deserves major kudos for the quick beta.

Warnings: Character death. This is the literary equivalent of self-indulgent navel gazing.

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Once in a while, usually after a glass or two of wine, she engages in a game of 'what if'. What if he hadn't gone with the president that night? What if they'd found him sooner? What if they'd got him to the hospital faster? What if she'd been there with him?

Survivors' guilt, the psychiatrist assigned to her from the Trauma Victims' Association had called it. She'd nodded, adding a little line of concentration between her eyebrows to indicate comprehension.

During her less self-indulgent, more rational moments, she acknowledges the truth in the therapist's words. She tells herself it's a stupid game; that you can't change what's happened.

All the same, it seems weird to her that life goes on in his absence -- that such a significant portion of her life should just disappear with the firing of a gun, and yet she should be expected to continue living it.

And yet, live it, she does. Gradually, without her realizing it, things began to return to normal. She wakes up. She showers. She goes to work. She goes home. She eats. She sleeps. She wakes up, and it’s another day.

If she smiles less often, or dates less frequently, or eats smaller meals, no one comments. That she hasn't visited his grave, or spoken to his mother, and refuses to cross the threshold of his office also goes unremarked on.

And then, she wakes up, and looks at the calendar – and for the first time in a year, she calls in sick.

Yahrzeit. She'd learned about the custom after his father had died. The anniversary of the death being a day of mourning and reflection. She'd watched him privately mourn and observe the custom while wearing his public façade of secularism. He'd said the Kaddish for his father, and she now feels disturbed in a way that she can't quite describe that there is no eldest son to say it for him.

* * * * * * No one takes a train to Connecticut. They drive, or fly, or take a bus – but the train, that's for Boston, New York, Philadelphia. The Amtrak clerk gives her an odd look when she asks for Hartford.

She finds the cemetery with little difficulty, and pauses at the gates – her mind fills with custom and rituals from her Catholic childhood, and threatens to push away what little she's absorbed from her time with him.

Grey clouds gather in the late summer afternoon, and raindrops splash like broken silver-dollars around her feet. Thunder rolls in the distance, and she finds its rumble oddly appropriate. Pausing briefly, she picks up a stone and walks through the gates.

She wanders slowly among the many grave markers scanning names until she reaches his – Joshua Lyman.

She kneels in front of it, and reaches out to trace the Star of David carved into the headstone. The wet grass soaks through her jeans, but she doesn't notice.

She says a silent prayer to his god, her god, the only god she's ever known, and then with a resolute clunk, places the stone on his marker. It is over.

The End

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