Grey Moon

[Public notice — City of Freiburg, with the Federal Ministry of Health. Day 153. Pushed to all devices.]

From Thursday, a Centre for Accompanied Departure (Zentrum für begleiteten Abschied) will operate at the former exhibition halls at the Messe, following the model established in Hamburg, Cologne, and Munich.

The Centre offers a calm, supervised, and dignified setting for residents who have reached a settled decision and prefer not to be at home. Access is voluntary. No referral is required. Companions may accompany a resident to the door; for reasons of capacity, they cannot remain.

Opening hours are continuous. There is no waiting list.

We ask for the public’s understanding, and for restraint from gathering at the entrance. Counselling remains available to those who wish it, though we recognise that for many the time for counselling has passed.

Further centres will follow as demand requires.

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Marko woke at four, the way Lena used to, and knew the flat was empty before he had a reason to.

He lay still and catalogued it, because cataloguing was what he had instead of dread. The radiator was cold — had been cold for weeks; the building’s heat had failed after the lifts and the stairwell lights, one system at a time, each failure announced by a notice nobody was left to post. The flat held the particular silence of a room with one breath in it instead of two. He had heard that silence coming for a long time, and had told himself he was imagining the slope of it, as he once had about the moon.

The note was on the kitchen table, under the salt, where she knew he’d find it because he always reached for the salt. One word, in a hand that had not been steady in months and was steady here:

Goodbye.

He read it twice, for errors, and there were none. The City had pushed the notice to his phone the evening before, like the moonrise warnings: a Centre, at the Messe, accompanied, dignified, no waiting list. He had read it standing at this same table and had said nothing to her, because there was nothing to say that she had not already decided, months ago, out loud, while he sat beside her and failed to find the lie in it. I can see how it ends, and it’s a long way to walk for that. She had not been describing despair. She had been doing arithmetic, the same as he did, and had arrived at her answer the way he kept arriving at his. He had only hoped her number and his were different.

Companions may accompany a resident to the door. They cannot remain. She had spared him the door.

He sat down. He was aware of the chair, of the cold coming up through the floor, and he waited to feel the thing he had spent a hundred days watching take everyone else — the grey hush, the motor going quiet, the lights going out room by room behind a person’s eyes. He waited for the moon to find, at last, the way in.

It didn’t come. He checked again, carefully, and what was there instead was older than the moon and entirely ordinary: he missed her. Not the vast grey thing that had taken the city, but the plain human kind, the size of one person, the grief that has been felling people one at a time since long before there was a word for it.

So he wasn’t going under. He understood that too, and it was not a relief. It meant the thing that had cleared him out years ago had held; that the room in him she had once walked into — the only warmth that had ever reached that far back — was a room again, and empty again, and he was still the man who got to stay in it and keep the record.

Then Marko, who had not wept in the whole of the adult life he could remember, who had written down the end of the world in a level hand and double-checked the dates, put his head down on the table beside the one word she had left him, and cried until the light came up grey over a city that no longer turned on its lamps to meet it.

He would keep the note. He kept everything. And in time he would get up, because getting up was the one thing left in him that still worked — and there was a child in London who did not yet know she was going to need someone to come.