Consolation Prize

There’s something incredibly garish about scenery like this juxtaposed against such depths of sorrow. The light is too bright, the colors too pure.

by Kelly O’Dell Stanley

My freckled skin and I sit in the shelter of the umbrella, but I’ve lathered myself in sunscreen anyway. With my skin, you can never be too careful. Just a couple feet away, the Mediterranean Sea wraps around us, lapping against the rough stone wall encircling our Maltese resort. The sunlight is bright, the kind of perfect pure light you’d expect on a tropical summer morning. I close my eyes, savoring the breeze and the snatches of tourists murmuring, laughing, and shrieking in a jumble of languages as they reapply oil to their bronze skin, reprimand the splashing children, contemplate another cocktail.

I am here with my friend Peggy. Our teen kids are off somewhere else, old enough that we don’t have to remain vigilant. It is paradise.

Which I can only afford because my parents are both dead.

Several years ago, I found myself wandering the curved, crowded roads of Positano all alone. The pastel buildings climbed the cliffs, while lemons ripened and olives dropped onto waiting nets. Handsome, olive-skinned men drove motorbikes and miniature trucks while tourists dove for safety. Around every curve, I’d stop and refocus my big camera, the splendor of the scenery like a physical shockwave that I could barely withstand, making my knees weak—or maybe that was just from all the steps. Thousands and thousands of steps. Always going up. I’d traveled to Italy for a writers’ workshop—not because it would have made Mom proud, but because she would have hated for me to travel so far by myself. 

She was no longer around to stop me.

Today is the seven-year anniversary of the day she ceased to be. In four days, we’ll mark the one-year anniversary of my dad’s death. I’m here thanks to their life insurance.

Deep breath. Focus on the beauty. But I can’t keep my eyes open against the sudden flood of tears.

There’s something incredibly garish about scenery like this juxtaposed against such depths of sorrow. The light is too bright, the colors too pure. 

And yet the hope in the air cooling the sweat on my skin as I soak in the sun just cannot be ignored. 

What is it? A sense of justice, a cosmic balancing of the scales? The impossibly blue water and the wide open, sunny skies and the colorful doorways and the lush foliage and the breezes across the water finally break through—or at least begin to crack—the dense and dark, cynical and ugly grief that go with me everywhere.

It is beautiful. The trip is wonderful. 

But I can’t shake the sense that it’s all just an extravagant consolation prize. If I hadn’t lost Mom and Dad, I wouldn’t be here.

And that’s the problem with a consolation prize: no matter how grand, you always know it’s a stand-in for the thing you really want. Your heart’s desire—that remains just out of reach.