I will warn you that these two pieces are sad, and if heaven forbid, you have lost a child, you might want to think twice about reading them. Thankfully, I have not had to endure that pain. However, recently a student at a nearby university was abducted and killed. It hit close to home for me and I struggled with a lot of different emotions in the weeks following her disappearance and the subsequent discovery of her. The strongest emotions I felt were for the young lady's parents. It is through my empathy for them that I was able to open my heart to these words. I admit I resisted for a while for obvious reasons, but my heart would not be still until I allowed the words to move. What struck me, which you will see in the writings, is when I heard that her parents went to the site where they found her. I was so moved and saddened by that. My heart still aches for their unimaginable loss.
The first piece is sort of stream of consciousness as I was opening to empathy and feeling the loss, pain, anger and confusion of any parent moving through this kind of loss and so it alternates between he and she. The second grew out of the first and has a more organized flow. They are offered with much love, sympathy and compassion.
Would it help to stand where she stood? Would it
help to walk the same path that he walked? I have no way of knowing, I have no
frame of reference for this. There was no preparation I could have been given
to imagine what her last breath might have been like. There is no one who could
train me to deal with the haunting of the words, “Was she scared? Or did it
hurt?” If only there was some type of surgery that could be done to extract the
words, “What if,” from my mind so they wouldn’t repeat over and over until the
end of my own days. My own days, which should have come to their natural end
long before his. He should’ve been standing beside my grave talking about what
a long and full life I had. Now no one will be able to do that, because my life
is no longer full. There is an empty place that will always remain vacant. Yes,
there will be love and laughter again, life will continue with sunrises and
sunsets, or so they say, but it will always be just a little bit different.
There will always be a slightly different tune to the harmony of my universe
because her laughter won’t accompany my own. I don’t know what to do with all
the comfort that I want to offer her that will go ever unoffered. I can’t offer
it to myself. How could I live with that, knowing he had none? If I could at
least have been there to put my arms around her, that might have been enough.
Probably not, but surely it would be better than this nothingness, this
inadequacy, this burning anger because I was not there, because I could not
save her, because there was and is nothing I can do to reverse it, to ease it,
to erase it, to protect him. Nothing. And strangely, that is what I feel. Who
knew that if you mixed intense sorrow, anger, fear, loss, heartbreak and
despair, you would get nothing? A strange recipe indeed, with a bitter after
taste. If I could taste, that is. There doesn’t seem to be much point in flavor
or pleasure. They tell me there will be one day. But how can there be when I
would feel such guilt at ever experiencing joy or pleasure again? If she
cannot, then why should I be able to? I have given up raging about it because I
have no one to rage against and even when I did it provided no relief, no
resolve, nothing. They tell me it will fade. They tell me he would want me to
go on living. But I’m so afraid to. I’m terrified to live if living means
letting go. We had so little time to share, just the blink of an eye really.
It’s not fair. We deserved more. We were going to have more. We need more time.
I can’t breathe. The awful irony is that now each minute seems a year. Each
week an eternity. How the days can drag so glacially on now, I have no idea. If
only I could go back. How very many things I would do differently. If only.
That has become my phrase of choice, my mantra. I think it hundreds of times a
day, a minute probably, without consciously doing it. It seems to come unbidden
from the stratosphere, drifting down like millions of snowflakes; if only, if
only, if only. I stand silently within the blizzard of if onlys. I catch a few
of them on my tongue and so give them voice, while millions of others drift
quietly to the corners of my mind, creating drifts here and there for me to
plow through later. I sometimes wish for a snow blower to come through in my
dreams and blast them all away. I simultaneously wonder if I will ever fall
asleep again without seeing her face and then fear that I will and what that
will mean when I do, if I do. If you can really call it sleep. Mostly I toss
and turn until I pass out from exhaustion and then wake up with a start at the
slightest sound. I can’t tell anyone any of this. They seem to think work will
get me through this, will take my mind off it. What they don’t know is that I
don’t want to take my mind off it, off her. They say time heals all wounds. But
it’s not true. It won’t heal his. I want to scream in the face of their
platitudes, yet I know they are trying to offer comfort however they can. They
have no frame of reference either. No one ever taught them how to comfort a
friend who is grieving the loss of a child. Let me tell you now, there is no
comfort you can possibly offer. You are better off not trying. Instead, let
your quiet presence be what you offer. It will be enough to have company
through the long, blinding blizzard.
Holy Ground
Lynda Allen
To the human eye, it seems
just a lonely patch of land,
deserted and quiet.
A few animals pass by and the
plants grow in peace.
I wonder if any of them were
witness to it,
if I would even want to know what
they saw if they could tell me.
To my eye, this lonely spot
is sacred, holy ground.
Not because a miracle
happened here,
but because it did not.
I hadn’t known that the
absence of a miracle
could create the holy.
I wish with all that I am
that I had not learned that
particular lesson,
in this particular way.
I hope one day to have the
courage
to believe in miracles again.
But today I do not.
Today I walk in silence
listening for echoes
and finding only loss.
How do I stand here where
they found her,
and still go on breathing?
Too many unanswerable
questions scream out
in my far from silent mind.
So I turn my attention to this
place.
Somehow, despite what
happened here,
it is able to hold the
sacredness,
express the fragility,
witness the loss and the
pain.
If only I could learn from it,
how to hold all those things,
and still give forth life,
beauty, light.
Instead I do the only thing I
can do in this moment,
I sit on a rock and weep.
I weep as if weeping is the
only thing I have ever known.
I weep every tear of joy or
pain that would have been offered
throughout her life, that I
will now never get to offer.
I weep for every first and
last never to be lived.
I weep for each breath lost,
every idea unborn, every laugh not heard,
every heartbeat not felt.
I weep without ceasing,
with only this place as my
witness.
My tears fall upon the quiet earth
in search of a miracle.
