The fading of a wild flower

 

In 2010, Sylvian died. 

I learned about it indirectly. There were no details offered, and I didn’t go looking for them. What information existed felt fragmentary, already shaped by other people’s need for closure. The official story, such as it was, left room for interpretation.

I suspect it was self-inflicted, I will never know for certain.

What unsettled me was not just the death, but its timing as we were in Reykjavík then even if we didn't live there.

Our youngest child had been born in February, and we had returned to christen him — a small ceremony, family gathered, the kind of ritual meant to anchor a life early, firmly. It was ordinary and tender. Children cried. Adults smiled too quickly for photographs. Coffee was poured.

 At some point during that visit, Sylvian died. Lilith called me with the news as she’d seen a notice in the local newspaper about her death. I read through it and what it didn’t say contained more details than what it said.

 The overlap felt wrong in a way I still can’t quite articulate. Two lives marked in opposite directions — one being welcomed, one disappearing — brushing past each other without contact.

 I noticed the dissonance immediately, my mind has imagined scenarios I cannot verify.

That she might have been driving past the park while we were there. That she might have seen us together — a family now, complete in ways she and I had never been — and that something inside her fractured under the weight of it.

 I know how this sounds.

 I also know how the mind behaves when faced with coincidence too precise to ignore. We search for causality because randomness feels irresponsible, because accepting not knowing feels like abandoning the dead to silence.

 But speculation is not truth,  it is proximity.

What I know is this:

Sylvian was not a villain in my life, she was not a lesson.

She was a person I loved, whose happiness I tried - unsuccessfully - to stabilize by absorbing risk that was never mine alone to carry.

Love never dies, it just changes shape and form.

Her death did not complete a story, it interrupted one.

I felt sadness, yes - but also something harder to name. A delayed recognition that lives we step out of continue moving without us, carrying consequences we no longer have standing to influence.

If her death was self-inflicted, then it belongs to her interior world — not to a momentary glimpse of mine.

That matters.

Are coincidences like this rare? Yes.

Do they mean something? Sometimes.

Often, they mean only that time is indifferent to our need for narrative spacing. Events cluster without consulting our capacity to absorb them. Life does not queue itself politely.

I have learned to be cautious with meaning.

 Assigning myself causal weight here would be another form of over-responsibility — a familiar temptation, and one I no longer indulge without resistance.

Sylvian’s death didn’t change my life outwardly, it changed it inwardly.

It reinforced something I had already begun to understand: that proximity is not protection, that love does not function retroactively, and that stepping away from a role does not shield you from its echoes.

I held my children differently that evening.

Not tighter. more consciously.

I don’t speak about Sylvian often.

Not out of shame or secrecy, but because she does not fit neatly into the story people expect. She exists in a narrow corridor of my life — intense, brief, consequential, and unresolved.

Her death doesn’t redeem anything, it doesn’t indict anything either.

It simply exists — a fact that arrived at the same time as a celebration, reminding me once again that life does not schedule its endings considerately.