My elderly neighbor, Mr. Dalen, once asked me to pick up a few plastic chairs for him — but not just any kind. He wanted the old-fashioned ones with a drainage hole right in the middle of the seat. I shrugged it off as a strange request, but I went looking anyway. When I couldn’t find that exact style, I brought home standard patio chairs instead.
He thanked me politely, the way he always did. But the look in his eyes told me I’d gotten something wrong. I convinced myself it was nothing — chairs are chairs, right? — but with Mr. Dalen, things were rarely without a reason. He was in his late seventies, thin as a reed, quiet as a whisper, always wearing that faded tan fishing hat. Since his wife, Nadine, had passed five years earlier, he’d lived alone, moving through life at a slow, careful pace.
The next day, I stopped by to tell him I could return the chairs and keep looking for the ones he’d asked for. He hesitated, then asked, “Do you know what those chairs are for?”
I guessed wrong — twice.
Finally, he answered in a low voice: “Rain.”
He told me how he and Nadine used to sit outside during storms, tucked beneath an umbrella, listening to the soft patter of rain on the fabric above them. Those old chairs, the ones with the hole in the middle, drained the water so they never ended up sitting in puddles. “These ones’ll pool,” he said, tapping the seat. “Not the same.”
A few days later, I noticed something wasn’t right. His grass was overgrown. His mailbox was stuffed. He hadn’t answered the door. Worried, I called for a wellness check. The paramedics found him collapsed from dehydration. He survived — stubborn man that he was — but the scare shook me.
While he was in the hospital recovering, I made it my mission to find those exact chairs. I searched every hardware store, every discount shop, every dusty back aisle until I finally spotted them — flimsy, white, plastic, with that little circle cut out of the middle.
When he came home, I had them set up in his backyard, facing the garden he used to tend with Nadine. It happened to be drizzling that afternoon, the kind of soft rain he liked. He eased himself into one of the chairs, tilted his head back, and closed his eyes as the raindrops passed through the opening and onto the ground beneath him.
“Black coffee?” he murmured after a moment — the way he used to ask Nadine on rainy mornings.
And in that small, quiet moment, I finally understood. The chairs had never really been about the chairs. They were about holding onto the pieces of someone you’ve loved and lost. The memories that hide in the simplest objects. The rituals that keep a person close, even long after they’re gone.
Sometimes grief doesn’t look like tears. Sometimes it looks like a plastic chair with a hole in the middle — waiting for the rain.