Melissa

Melissa is Hig’s wife, the companion at the heart of his lost life and the absence that continues to shape his choices after the pandemic. Their history moves from an ordinary home beside a Denver lake to an unexpected pregnancy and a fatal illness. Hig’s memories of her are bound not only to love and bereavement but also to a world of animals, seasons, and familiar places that is disappearing around him.

Identity and Life Before the Pandemic

Hig describes Melissa as an old hippy, while qualifying that she was not very old and looked good. His account places her in the intimate, everyday world they made together in Denver: they lived beside a lake, only seven minutes from downtown, near bookstores, restaurants, and movie theaters. From the windows of their small house they could see grass, water, and mountains. The lake’s resident geese shared the seasons with migrating Canada geese, arriving and departing in noisy formations.

The geese became a small recurring point of disagreement. During evening walks in October and November, Hig and Melissa tried to distinguish the resident birds from the migrants. Hig believed he knew them better and thought Melissa was wrong, although he considered her very smart. When they got Jasper as a puppy, Hig took Jasper’s different reactions to the wary migrants and the bolder resident birds as confirmation of his own theory. The episode captures the couple’s affectionate familiarity through a minor dispute rather than a dramatic conflict: Hig trusted his instincts, while Melissa could challenge his certainty.

Marriage, Pregnancy, and Shared Intimacy

For a long time, Melissa and Hig had no children because she could not become pregnant. They consulted a doctor, but declined the treatments offered and accepted a life centered on one another. Her later pregnancy therefore felt miraculous to Hig. They had become accustomed to their life as a couple, and he was unsure whether he could love anyone more than Melissa; watching her sleep, he realized that he loved her more than anything. The pregnancy altered the future they had imagined together, even as the pandemic would prevent that future from unfolding.

Melissa’s place in Hig’s emotional life is expressed through his sense that they belonged to the same circle of existence, while also being entrusted with particular souls. He imagines himself as capable of holding her with care, but recognizes that she may have been the one sustaining him. His account of their closeness is not limited to domestic routines or romance: it presents their marriage as a form of mutual keeping, a relationship in which each gave the other a place in the world. Hig wrote thirty poems after college, twenty-three of them for his wife, another indication of how deeply she occupied his imaginative life.

Illness and Death

When the pandemic reached them, the hospital across the lake became the center of their final days. Orange helicopters landed there, and the hospital’s buildings were taken over and filled with the dead. Hig remembers that they considered flying west, but by the time the illness had advanced, they went to the hospital instead. Melissa’s condition worsened with severe gastrointestinal symptoms and lungs filling as in pneumonia. Hig believed she would recover, the one thing he had lied to her about; she understood that it was a lie and did not hold it against him.

As Melissa became gravely ill, she asked Hig to end her suffering. He honored that request, and the decision became one of the most difficult parts of his life afterward. He later questioned whether he had done the right thing and remembered her struggle in the final moments, even while insisting to himself that he had kept the promise he made. The act is therefore presented not as a simple resolution but as a painful collision between care, consent, and the instinct to hold on. After Melissa died, Hig was not allowed to bury her; she was cremated with the others. The loss left him without the ordinary practices of farewell and burial that might have given grief a settled form.

Aftermath and the Persistence of Memory

Fishing recurs throughout Hig’s life, including at moments surrounding his relationship with Melissa. He fished when he met her and scarcely dared to hope he had found someone he could love so deeply; after her death, he continued to fish amid the growing disorder of dwindling supplies, longer fuel lines, and riots. It offered a familiar way to move through grief, but it did not restore what had vanished. As the trout disappeared from warming streams, the ecological loss came to stand alongside personal bereavement without reducing one to the other. Hig mourns Melissa and the fish as distinct losses within the same damaged world.

At the airport, years after the collapse, Hig’s imagination briefly reconstructs a return to his former life. A routine landing clearance makes him picture Melissa alive, seven months pregnant, waiting with Jasper on the Front Range as he comes home from a flight. The imagined scene sharpens the distance between the familiar domestic return he longs for and the reality of a journey with no true return. Melissa remains present through such memories, not as an active participant in the post-collapse events but as the person against whom Hig measures what has been lost.

Narrative Role and Legacy

Hig sometimes reaches for biblical imagery to describe the moral landscape of his life, imagining Melissa as Eve and himself as closer to Cain. The comparison is his own, and it reveals how he understands himself through guilt and survival rather than establishing Melissa as a religious allegory. His grief is also inseparable from the collapse of the natural world he loved: memories of home, birds, mountains, and trout carry the texture of a life that can no longer be recovered.

By the time Hig returns to the airport after a long absence, he recognizes that Bangley has become his family. That recognition marks a change in the shape of his attachments, not an erasure of Melissa. She remains central to his remembered past and to the future that never came to pass, including the child they expected. Through Hig’s memories, Melissa’s significance lies both in the life they shared and in the enduring moral and emotional consequences of losing her.