To Live
I sat at my grandmother's antique walnut desk. I grasped a colored pencil in my small nine-year-old hand, working at my latest creation with the intensity that only true artists and children can summon. Though my eyes were glued to my picture, I noticed a thickening of the air as someone entered the room. I tore myself from my masterpiece; there stood my grandmother, eyes red with tears, Kleenex in hand, chin trembling.
"What's the matter now?" I asked, my voice brimming with impatience.
"It's your mom." Her voice sounded as sodden as her face looked. "We don't think she's going to make it."
I leapt from my chair. "Shut up! Shut up! I'm not going to listen to that. Don't you dare give up on her like that!"
My father drew up behind her, more silently than was usually in his nature to do. "Oh, Doris, don't play games," he snapped, his annoyance mirroring my own. "Just tell her."
"Tell me what?"
"Your mother is dead."
Silence descended upon the room and hung palpably between the three of us, an impossible curtain to lift even when I pushed past my father and grandmother and flew down the stairs.
"It's not true!" I yelled. "You're wrong! You're not doctors, you don't know what you're talking about!"
When I reached my mother's room, though, I knew instantly that, indeed, they did know what they were talking about. Something was missing from that room; something was gone that wasn't ever coming back. I ran to my mother's side, wrapping my arms around her body, pale and thin from the long ravages of cancer, as though I could somehow infuse it with my own life force. I burst into tears as I saw the gold earrings still on her now-deaf ears, the ones I'd saved up to buy for her birthday, only three days ago.
Feeling the weight of a hand on my shoulder, I wheeled around and fled back up the stairs.
A week later, I stood in the cemetery watching as my mother's coffin was lowered into the ground. The sun shone a brilliant gold and the most discriminating eye could not have found a wisp marring that blue May sky. I was wearing the only dress I owned, and its pink flowers and white lace cuffs matched the mood of the day, if not the event. I felt as out of place as I looked among the crowd of black-clad, weeping mourners. I had been closer to my mother than anyone there, yet mine were the only dry eyes. They wandered over the sky, the sun, the deep green of the trees surrounding the cemetery and the blazing green of the fresh grass beneath my feet. My ears took in the blissful, oblivious trilling of birds, the rustle of leaves against one another as they were touched by the gentle hand of the breeze. That was where my mother was, I thought. Not in some stupid wooden box in the ground. Not in some stodgy old priest's idea of heaven. All around us.
My grandmother stood beside me, too absorbed in her own grief to even acknowledge my presence. My father stood on my other side, his tall frame casting a shadow over me, his glazed eyes searching and assessing me.
"You will grieve eventually," he whispered, with patronizing sureness. "You're in denial right now."
I am not, I retorted internally. You're in denial if you think crying and acting distraught all the time is the only way to grieve. I didn't dare to say it aloud, though. My father the amateur psychologist would only be further convinced that I fell into one of his favorite diagnoses. Anyone else who happened to hear might think something even worse -- that I simply didn't care.
Later, at the reception in the church basement, a woman I'd never met walked up to me, her tear-stained face filled with an almost comical pity, and placed an unwelcome, quivering hand on my shoulder.
"You'll feel better eventually," she told me. "I understand what you're going through." No, I thought, you don't understand. No one does. I wanted to shout that at her, but my sense of propriety overcame my desire for self-expression for the moment, and besides, she looked upset enough already. I merely nodded and excused myself.
My best friend's birthday party was the same day as the funeral. I changed from my flowered dress into a T-shirt and blue jeans in the bathroom of the church, thinking all the while of how shocked all these people in black were going to be when they found out where I was going. Maybe it would teach them a lesson. My life would end someday, just as theirs would, but unlike them, I was not going to waste my life thinking about death. I had shed my tears for my mother, and it was now my turn to live.
©2000 Elizabeth Hebert
back to fiction
|
