weight/wait
I wish it were winter. I wish the earth was frozen, all of life encrusted with ice. No expectations of buds and blooms. No demands for participation in life. Just dormancy. A wood fire that asks nothing of me but my cold body. Too cold to go outside. Blizzard warnings that hold us captive in our home.
But it’s not. It’s summer. Hot summer loaded with tasks and demands. All the animals on this farm with their babies. More teenagers than babies now. The fields still throwing up new wildflowers and plants in waves of life. I watched the young barn swallows go from thought to egg to demanding nestlings. And then, I watched as their parents gave them flying lessons above my garden. There were five of them - those baby birds. No matter their awkward flight, they always ended up lined up on the hydro line, all five in a row.
Two years. More than two years now. And there are days when the peace in my heart can only come from a giving God and the enduring love of my daughter. And then in rolls a grief that hollows me out like the winds of a nuclear explosion. I am wasted. Flattened. And I don’t know what to do.
The other day I was feeding animals outside when the temperature suddenly dropped. I was holding a metal door open above my head when all at once I heard a roar and smelled that smell. I’ve been in a tornado before. I know that sound and that scent of electricity in the air. Before I could do anything a crack of lightning hit right beside me. The force of it dropped me to my knees and my lips burned in the air. My husband was yelling for me from the house. I yelled back but he couldn’t hear me through the wildness of the storm. I had to run for the shelter of the house. Just as I got there, hail started - the size of golfballs.
That’s grief. Sudden and electric and sometimes you are lost in the enormity of it all. You call and nobody hears and you realise you really are utterly alone sometimes.
Nobody asks anymore. Nobody wants to talk to me about my daughter. And when they do, they tell me how I must be feeling. A narration of nothing they know of. I’ve become protective and isolated with my grief. It moves and shifts and I can’t trust where it will be tomorrow never mind put it into some sort of defining words for another to hold. I got nothin’.
Two years ago my husband and I spent weeks combing through literature, evidence, statements. We consulted with some friends and experts for their guidance and opinions. A scientist friend helped us locate a lab that would let us pay to have the pot that was in our daughter’s car tested. We compiled a large binder full of information, hundreds of pages, and sent it off to our provincial coroner’s office with a formal request for a coroner’s inquest. How did we ever do that? Shock, I suppose. We were driven for justice and fuelled by shock.
We heard back yesterday. We read through their report. This is where my next sentence should be that it looks hopeful. That there are 17 points recommended as failures and deficits and areas that need to be evaluated. We might just get that inquest after all. But all I can think of is the autopsy report at the front of the pages. All I can think of is the weight of my daughter’s brain.
No parent should ever know the weight of their child’s brain.
You used to lay that head on my lap and pick up my hands and put them in your hair. And I would weave your hair through my fingers for hours. Braiding small strands all the way down. Your “horse’s mane”, thick and heavy. I can still remember the weight of it, the feel of it. If I stopped because I got distracted you would reach up, grab my hands and get me going again. Such a simple thing. I run it through my mind often. I’m scared that if I don’t I will forget the weight of you. I’m scared my fingers will never find their way back.
My beautiful, strong, brilliant girl. They took pieces of your nails. Trimmings of your hair. Swabs and scrapings. Evidence if need be. Little pieces of you sitting somewhere in little plastic bags in a box. I can’t stand it.
I know that’s not you there. I know you are no longer those things. Those pieces. Measurable DNA. I know you have moved on. But it doesn’t matter today. Today I know the weight of your brain and that’s too much to know.
Please keep talking to us here about her. It’s no substitute for a face to face conversation, where we can ask you all about her and the sort of person she was. But we here still want to know.
I think of Mila. My sister and I were talking of her yesterday. And of you. And the seeming impossibility of continuing to exist with the grief of a precious child who has gone elsewhere.
Toasting Mila and sending you love from Texas, tonight.
Tara we can't hear you, it's true , we can't know that weight because if we are honest we can't imagine it, we don't want to imagine it. We can't hear you because we dont know those words but we can feel you. We can feel your anguish even if we can't name it or relate it to any known feeling. We can keep reading. We can keep Mila alive in our imaginations walking bow in hand trailed by barn cats. You, we can love you. Love you with all we have. None of our love will ever replace the love of the weight you carry, grief is heavy. It's love though, and with everything I've got I send it to you to remind you that although we can't carry your weight I will always walk with you and sit with you when walking becomes too much. I will always listen to grief and love, they can't exist without eachother as you have taught me. I'll remember Mila, and I'll love you. Keep talking I'm here.