My brain has spent the day trying to shut off. I read until what I’m reading burrows too close to the raw nerve endings surrounding the space where a piece of me was ripped out, then it tries to fall asleep, then loses itself in the working of my muscles and the sweat running down my face and into my eyes, then floats in a determined oblivion while I go about my normal tasks as though in a trance.
God, it’s that day again.
The songs and prayers and Bible verses like incantations, weaving the strings of a soul breaking free into a bracelet, tying her to us for just this little bit longer. Did I leave because I was asked to, or because I couldn’t take it anymore? Did I happen to get back in time, or did she wait for me? We went about our normal lives so much back then, refusing to admit that we were losing her, refusing to know what we already knew. It would have been cruel to keep her as she was, her once vibrant body a husk filled with only bones and pain. She didn’t want to be remembered like that. I can’t stop remembering her like that, my brain snagging on the horror of those months like a scratch on a CD. Diediediediediediediedie. I am educated enough to give the scratch a name, trauma. This is a trauma response. Mostly I can avoid that scratched spot, but I won’t today. Today belongs to her as surely as the day she was born, and I will not deny her my memories. She deserved to live so much more fully than that, but it is what I have. I turn the knob and open the door.
My sisters are singing as I walk in, a song from their church I don’t know. Mom is on her knees by the hospital bed, clutching the hand of her youngest child. Merry is curled up on the bed against the wall on Rose’s other side, as close as she can get without hurting the sister who has been the other half of herself ever since Rose was born, four years and 364 days after her…fourteen years and 359 days ago. Ivy leans against the door, just past the foot of the bed. She offers me a sadly serene smile as I approach. She has been in this room before. Her mother. Her father. Her twin. All eaten alive by the same ravenous monster that is taking our Rose. She survived it three times over, and will again. Of all of us here, only she knows how much this is going to hurt. Only she knows what it will take to move on. I step past her, meet my husband’s eyes across the room, and I know what he has known for months. Gingerly, I scooch onto the end of the bed, touch Rose’s foot through the sheet. She was restless before but now she’s completely still, her breath barely moving her chest. Her face is turned towards Mom, her still magnificent hair messy against her shoulder. A lifetime’s worth of words clog my throat and stick there. Mom says the words the rest of us won’t, the hardest words a parent can say to a child: “It’s OK, Sweetie. You can go now.”
She doesn’t, not right away. Rose is a fighter, she’s been fighting for months. Time stretches into the spaces between breaths. Even when she stops drawing air her heart beats on. My brother and his almost wife arrive, too late and dressed for their rehearsal dinner. Rose is wearing only a tee and panties under the sheet, the indignity of dying such that even the softest clothing hurts her tissue paper skin. But it doesn’t matter now, and she has to be washed and dressed before the undertaker comes. Her favorite jeans and jacket, her red Converse. When we move it is slowly, dreamlike. I brush her hair, so like mine but finer, like my daughter’s. At some point there is thunder, the sky cracked open by the force of her passing. That was Rose. Wherever she went she left a wake.
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