Fic: Two Summers, 1-17
Just as they’ve got their own stories, they’ve all got their own ways of dealing.
And as much as grief is a private thing that everyone experiences in their own way, you can’t help but reach out to each other.
Maybe it’s because she’s a nurse, maybe it’s because she went through her own hellish experience losing her fiancée, but Christine Chapel’s always there in the background. For all of them.
She’s the one who found him destroying himself on the Observation Deck, she’s the one who took him back to Sickbay, she’s the one who told Bones to back off, she’s the one who held him after those aliens offered his dream his nightmare. And it’s not just him she does that for.
Jim thinks she should get a commendation. But Starfleet doesn’t give out awards for that kind of thing.
Christine does something that Jim’s not sure he’ll ever be able to do. She provides a sense of normalcy that manages to include the terrible reality. It’s not that she makes grief seem normal and routine, or that she downplays the feelings by treating them as though they’re part of human habit. She doesn’t overemphasize or make anything dramatic. He’s never seen her coddle her patients.
It’s the environment she creates. It’s the silent acknowledgement that grief is strong, intense, unpleasant and unwieldy and that’s okay. It’s okay to be overwhelmed, it’s okay to laugh and forget, it’s okay to cry. She makes you feel safe when you feel the most vulnerable, but she also reminds you with those grey eyes that this will pass. That the ache will go away and leave you transformed. And that’s okay too.
Christine-she’s one of those rare people who stands between seeing and understanding. She is more than seeing, less than understanding, a steady haven Jim didn’t even know existed and didn’t even realize he used. She gives sympathy, but like medicine she gives it in doses, according to however much is needed at the time. She will eventually stop giving it because there are others who have greater need, because too much sympathy can make you drunk with emotional dependence. Christine has no patience for those who purposefully seek pity.
Jim thinks that’s her way of mourning.
Like him, she never got to say goodbye to her beloved. It must have been all the more agonizing because she didn’t know whether Roger Korby was alive or dead for years. And when she finally learned the truth that was coupled with the brief moments she thought he had survived-Jim saw how it shattered her again. How she pulled herself together again. They still never found the doctor’s body. Christine still never got the closure that humans need.
Because humans need to lay their dead to rest. They need to send them off to the next world, they need to bury them or entomb them or watch the body burn or hold elaborate ceremonies as a last rite so that they, the living, and continue on in peace. They need to be assured that the last remains of their loved ones have been properly cared for so that the dead can sleep or be at peace or take flight.
How many legends are there, in every human culture, about the dead haunting places? How many beliefs originate from this idea that the dead continue living, in their own way? Human treatment of the dead goes back to prehistoric times, when people were mere hunters and gatherers but they still decorated their dead with grave goods. It goes back to the first recorded literature, it goes back to ancient war rites when battles were halted and warriors of opposite camps came out together on the field to collect their dead. Jim remembers reading the Iliad, not understanding why the hell Priam would go to Achilles to ask for the body of Hector and why the hell Homer obsessed so much about funeral pyres.
Now he knows.
And he thinks this, making things safe for others to mourn, is Christine’s way of trying to get closure.
He’s not saying that’s the only reason why she does it. He’s not saying that she’s unable to move on. Jim admires her quiet strength, the deep well of her compassion. He’d never noticed it before and now that he has, he’s grateful in a way beyond words. But since Spock’s death and the fact that their life on the Enterprise continues to bring in wounded and casualties, he sees another side to her and the meaning of the unearthly grey in her eyes.
Jim wishes-he wishes a lot of things, but this is specifically for her-that they had stayed behind and searched for Dr. Korby’s body.
But some things are open ended like that, and grief is the way humans try to find closure. He can’t do anything about it now. Jim makes a resolution though, that he’ll try his hardest to always recover the bodies of the dead.
It’s the least he can do as an unspoken thank you to a woman who will never lay her own beloved to rest.
And suddenly he wonders if that is why his mother was always in space.