Ezra’s P.O.V
I had always known how to mourn. The budding start of my life had been built around grief — the grief of infidelity, the betrayal of a father, the exile of a scorned step-mother. The foundations of my life, the scaffoldings of my character, had been created with the protein blocks of suffering. I was unloved as a child of an affair. I was born to suffer. And now, again, life had reminded me of who I am, put me into my rightful place of pain, with the death of a mate.
I had always known how to mourn, but I have never had to mourn a beloved's death like I did now. It was always one loss after loss, the kind of loss that was brought about by physical separation rather than spiritual.
This was my first time grieving the loss of someone's life that I had held dearer than my own. My mother had taken her life after years of having carried the brunt of my father's mistreatment, but I had not known what love truly meant back then, so I did not mourn her like I should have. I did not know until now what love was, and it was Lily who had helped me put a definition to the word. It was her death that I first mourned.
It was with a heavy heart that I took care of Lily's funeral. She had always been the light of my life, the joy of my darkest days. She had this remarkable penchant of making me feel loved even though I did not think I deserved it. She was the one who helped me heal, the one who made the most painful days seem like a breeze. She was my everything, and so the least I could do for her was to organize her funeral even though my body did not want to get up and live life after my one true mate had gone on another journey ahead of me.
I knew she would not want me to mope around, and I knew that she would have wanted me to keep going no matter how badly I wanted to stay still and let the cycle of life run its course on my motionless body. Plus, I also knew that, even though the pack had expected me to mourn, I must project an image of strength and composition, because if I allowed myself to fall apart, I did not know if they would still find any use for me in the hierarchy of our town.
I had the women of our pack dress her corpse up like a bride. It hurt to think of her as a corpse, but what other word could I use to describe the paleness of her skin, the stillness of her chest, and the lifelessness of her eyes? I had the women, too, make a bed of flowers for her, woven out of the white lilies that were her favorite. I wanted to make sure that her mortal vessel would at least find comfort in the physical manifestations of the essence of her soul.
Just like me, the entire pack was in mourning, heartbroken and devastated. They were all moved by her loss, and if their accumulated love for her was enough to bring her back to life, she had long since been up and running by now. Everyone loved Lily; had loved her as if she was their own, and she never complained about anything and anyone. She had a pure heart, which was important for a pack healer. She helped anybody and everybody who needed it.
She was their pearl and flower, and her death was indeed a great loss for the pack. They had all lost a friend, an advisor, a sister, a daughter.
To me, specifically, Lily had been the only one who had made me feel like I deserved to be loved without conditions. When my mother took her life, she was the one who held my hand. When my father kicked me out of the pack, she was there to comfort me. She made me feel like I was the only one who mattered, and for a while, that much had been true. It didn't matter if I was exiled. It didn't matter if my own father didn't love me.
As long as I had Lily, nothing could touch or break me. We were unstoppable. I could have done anything, if she was still next to me. I could have bent the whole of time and space if she was still alive. Even when we were separate during my exile, even a single though of her gave me the strength to continue forward. I hadn't known why I had been so driven by her until I found out last year that she was my mate…and then, everything started to make sense.