"The story is not so much about their ongoing grief, but how the two will ever accept the other."

My inspiration for this story came from my mother telling me that my father, at the age of 48, had been diagnosed with arthritis in his spine. Such a disorder involves a lot of pain and misery that will not kill you, but will disable you greatly, more and more as time passes until you can no longer walk or do many other things on your own.  His diagnosis caused me to think about my own future (e.g. the hereditary aspects of the disease and the fact that tragedy can hit anyone at anytime).
In that sense, it is about ongoing grief to me.
However, Tammy is correct in pointing out the importance of the mother and daughter's struggle to accept each other after their losses. They have both trapped themselves in their ongoing grief, and the only way for them to move on is to accept each other.


"Is the mother delusional? Does she hear what she wants to hear? Or is she speaking to her husband spiritually?"

I did not intend for the mother to seem delusional. She speaks to her husband in the same way that people go to graves and speak to their late loved ones. I think Tammy describes it perfectly with the term "spiritually." In her time of need, where she would normally turn to her daughter, Teresa is abandoned due to Cara's own loss. Therefore, she has turned to the one place that reminds her of her husband: his favorite comfy chair.
She uses his portrait almost as a headstone as she unloads her worries onto him and comes to her own understanding of the parallel between her loss and her daughter's loss. "It must have been love, Rusty. "


"The portrait of Rusty shows his face 'lined with pain' as though suggesting he did not live the happiest life."

I had intended for the "lined with pain" description to imply that he had been seriously ill for a long time, such as my own father's situation.  The prolonged illness is also evidenced by the newness of the chair in the picture vs. the condition it is in when the story takes place. I wanted him to be portrayed as a happy man who was trying to get the best out of life (a new chair, a loving portrait). The pain he was in is more of an undertone.


"As short as the story is, it still manages to cause the reader to ask many questions and ponder, making the story last much longer than it takes to read."

I am glad that Tammy made this comment about my story because the whole point of a flash fiction is to take a very short amount of space and words and then use them make a concise story with a strong, lasting meaning. One of the larger points I was going for are the parallels between the way individuals react to loss (both in dealing with themselves and others). I also wanted to show the way that people often understand how to deal with grief but tend to ignore that knowledge when they are dealing with it themselves.