‘You don’t want to see this,’ they say. ‘It’s something you’ll never be able to unsee.’

Click-clack.

Thud. Scrape. 

‘Oops!’

Click-clack. Click-clack.

Somehow, I think hearing it is worse.

I’m moved through the house by hands. So many hands. Hands everywhere. Holding. Shoving. Touching. Pushing.

My aunt drags me to the sunroom. I’m pulled to a spot on the couch beside her. She holds onto my arm, and my skin blooms white beneath her fingertips. I’ll be bruised tomorrow.

I do as I’m told and listen as the sound of shuffling feet and metal wheels scraping against the terracotta porch tiles embeds itself deep within my fractured psyche.

From the corner of the room, a flickering light draws my attention. Colourful bulbs that blink and strobe. The Christmas tree. Mum must have turned it on. I notice the green lights are broken. The tree flashes red and blue, mirroring the macabre display that is currently bathing our street.

A van door slams shut. Thunk.

Someone is crying, or screaming or both.

Don’t they know Jon is sleeping? That sweet little boy. He was ushered into the land of dreams with a kiss goodnight from Mum and promises of only one more day ’til Santa comes. Let him sleep. Please, dear God, let him sleep.

Hours pass, or days or weeks.

The house is overflowing with flowers and people. I’m passed from one pair of hands to the next. So many hands. Hands everywhere. Grabbing. Hugging. Patting. Squeezing.

They talk to me, at me and about me.

‘They thought they got her heart beating again for a moment there.’

Click-clack.

‘Poor thing found her.’

Click-clack. Click-clack.

‘It’s okay to cry, dear,’ they say. ‘It’s not healthy to keep it in.’

But it’s Christmas day so instead I drink, I drink and I drink. The pleasant burn prolongs the blessed numbness that’s beginning to slip from my grasp.

Days pass, or weeks or months.

Eventually I’m standing alone in the hallway. Jon’s asleep. I don’t sleep. I can’t sleep.

There’s a photograph of my mother hanging on the wall. It’s crooked. I pull the frame down. There’s a gouge in the paint from where the coroner bumped it as they wheeled my mother’s body out.

Click-clack.

Thud. Scrape.

‘Oops!’

Click-clack. Click-clack.

Hearing is worse. Much, much worse.

*

‘I HATE YOU!’ I scream.

My palm a patchwork of punctures and scratches. Blood trailing down my arm in rivulets.

Serves me right. I’m the idiot who tried to uproot a rose bush with her bare hands.

Crimson splashes to the grass below.

I hate you.

I hate you.

The words become a chant in my mind—a silent prayer. Their barbed nature pierce my heart, much like the thorns that now pierce my flesh.

‘If I die ...’ she’d say to me on a random Tuesday.

Who does that—forcing arbitrary promises based in morbid hypotheticals?

It was never serious. No one could have possibly known.

A ‘Mother’s Love’, the rose bush is called. But I don’t feel the love. As I look at delicate petals, all pink and cream in hue, all I feel is hatred and a weight—like shackles—around my soul.

Promises made in jest now serve as my bindings. With a grin, she tied me to a future no one could have foreseen. How could I leave now? How could I possibly?

Those barbs in my heart fester and putrefy. They release an unholy bitterness that oozes from my every pore, turning all it consumes to gangrenous rot.

‘Oh, you look so much like your mum,’ they say, ‘I bet you miss her so much.’

It takes all I have in me not to sneer.

I hate her.

I miss no one.

‘I’d love a tea, please!’

‘You sounded so much like your mum when you said that!’ They exclaim. They’re taken back by it, the shock written upon their face.

The tea curdles in my stomach. I’ll never drink tea again.

Piece by piece, I excise her from my life and mind. Eroding away all I loved and was, and casting it into a roiling sea. I am rage and it is blinding.

With battered hands that are still raw and bleeding, I pull and tug at the ‘Mother’s Love’, but the damn bush will not budge. Thorns lodge into the wounded flesh of my palms—it stings. I try to pry them from deep beneath my skin, but all I’m doing is making myself bleed and bleed.

My hands paint the fragile blooms with the sickly shade of violence.

The rose survives—I do not. 

‘I HATE YOU!’ I scream.

I hate you.

I hate you.

I rip and I tear at the rose, at myself, at the ‘Mother’s Love’, at my mother’s love. But she cannot be excised so long as I breathe. I am my mother’s daughter. It’s her blood that I bleed.

I return to the house and wash my hands clean in the same room where she breathed her last breath. Feeling fragile and numb, I walk to her bed. I grab the coat from the bedpost and lay down where she once laid her head. It smells like her still—like safety and warmth.

Though my hands have stopped bleeding, my heart’s never felt more raw.

I love you.

I love you.

It should have been me.

*

What if? If only …

A constant tangle of thoughts and questions swirl through my mind. A kaleidoscope of hypotheticals.

What if I’d gotten to her sooner?

If only her doctor had done his damn job.

Sleep is a distant memory that’s been stolen by death and his henchmen.

Three days awake—one hour asleep.

I fill a sea of endless time with videos. So many videos—videos about death, dying and everything in between. My mind fixates. As if somewhere within the knowledge I consume, there will be an answer to how I can undo this nightmare. 

Know thy enemy, is that not the phrase?

‘Miasma theory is actually why in the nineteenth century cemeteries were removed from the middle of big cities,’ the cheerful mortician explains from my screen.

The funeral’s delayed. Of course it is. The whole world enters limbo the week between Christmas and New Years. Even coroners and funeral directors are spending time with their families during the ‘joyous’ holiday season.

The dead may be sleeping, but I’m not. I can’t.

Insomnia and fatigue are now my closest companions.

What if this is all just some big mistake?

If only they’d managed to keep her heart beating.

We visit the coroner’s court and the funeral home. The buildings feel like giant refrigerators.

Mum hates the cold. Hated.

It’s her worst nightmare—being trapped in a big freezer. Although at present, I think her biggest concern would be the fact they had her brain in a jar, and her organs stuffed in a plastic bag.

I think I know too much about autopsies.

What if? If only …

I don’t know enough about autopsies.

I blink and suddenly, three years have passed. I’ve been awake too long, with not nearly enough sleep.

She’s gone now—ashes and dust, buried beneath a rose bush named ‘Mother’s Love’.

No more time for bargains with God, or meeting demons at the crossroads. There is no more ‘what if?’ All that’s left is ‘if only …’

If only I could know death and find the icy demons’ weakness.

So, knowing becomes my obsession. I devour. Consume. Inhale. Learn all there is to learn. Hours upon hours of documentaries, audiobooks, and podcasts. As if by knowing all I possibly can, somehow, I can stave off death’s frigid grasp—or at least, ease the bitter sting of when He comes for those I love and hold dear.

If only …

‘Grandad,’ I call out. ‘I tried calling, but you didn’t pick up. I’ve just come to ask if you wanted to come watch Jon’s swimming lesson tom—’

Death steals my words like He steals breath.

He greets me in the doorway, as if we were old friends.

The door catches on a hand as cold as ice.

Grandad.

He’d been reaching for something. For his panic button? For help?

What if I’d gotten to him sooner?

This can’t be happening again.

The world around me swirls in a haze of deja vu.

This time, I’m the one screaming.

Sirens are blaring—the paramedics are asking me questions.

Somewhere in the distance, I swear I hear death’s icy laughter.

If only … what if?

*

I don’t sleep. I can’t sleep.

There is nothing to do. Nothing that can help.

No warm milk. No teas. No counting sheep.

‘I’m afraid there really isn’t much else we can try,’ the doctor says.

I cry and I beg. Please, just help me sleep.

No meditation. No melatonin. No prescription strength anything.

I try anything and everything. I’m going out of my mind. There is no quieting the maelstrom raging inside—it’s robbed me completely. I’m nothing but a shell. It’s even robbed me of the ability to close my damn eyes.

Then suddenly, it happens.

Like a miracle, I sleep.

For days at a time, there is no leaving my bed.

Suddenly, something changes. Something dark and sinister creeps in.

A little voice whispering, perhaps you’d be better off dead.

There’s been so much I’ve buried down—so much I’ve let slip away. Until—in what feels like the blink of an eye—I’ve become a fragment of myself.

My mother died, my grandfather too, but I am the ghost. I’ve spent so much time being haunted that I haven’t witnessed the change. I haven’t noticed that I’ve become the one doing the haunting. I move through life like a phantom. I exist, but I am not truly living.

For years, there had been a purpose. Just push through until Jon, that sweet little boy, didn’t need me anymore—and then, he didn’t need me anymore.

So, in bed is where I stay.

I stop reading books and watching my favourite shows. It takes me days to answer a text on my phone. I can’t decide what to eat nor what to wear, and it would be a cold day in hell before I have the energy to dry my hair.

My health plummets. My weight balloons.

But it’s so comfortable here, in this bed cocoon. It’s safe here, inside my room.

I’m safe.

Safe.

Safe me.

Save me.

SAVE ME!

In my mind I cry out:

Can nobody hear me?

Does nobody see?

Am I truly a ghost?

Where are you?

I’m screaming inside:

Help me!

Somebody. Anybody. Help me!

Please!

I haven’t left my bed in a week. I haven’t answered my texts or liked any posts. I have family and friends—but what does that mean, if nobody notices when I’m drowning?

I can’t ask for help—I can’t find the words.

I smile and laugh and say ‘Oh, I’m just not feeling that well.’

Help me!

I can’t get up. I’m stuck. If I stay here any longer, I’m fairly sure I’ll rot.

I need to get up. I need out of this bed.

All my friends have stopped calling. I only have one friend.

One friend.

One friend who sticks with me through it all.

She drops what she’s doing.

She hears my silent calls.

She sits by my side as everything that’s been buried springs up from the ground.

One friend who doesn’t leave me. Who holds me as the dam breaks, and tells me everything’s okay as I bawl.

*  

Healing. Moving on.

For something so monumental, it was all rather simple.

A subtle shifting of pieces here and there. Then, click.

The final piece fits into place.

Or rather, not the final piece—but a missing piece.

It’s not the prettiest part of the puzzle—a little bit broken, torn and glued together in more places than not—but it’s a piece integral to the picture, nevertheless.

There is no sudden ‘Aha!’

No ‘BAM’—now, I’m no longer grieving.

It’s gradual. A slow weaving of thread into the very fabric of my soul.

A shift so gentle that there’s no recognising it has even taken place.

Until I’m driving in my old beat-up Camry that has once been my mother’s, when I realise what song has been playing on the stereo. I realise I’ve been singing. I am singing. 

‘What Makes You Beautiful’.

That was our song.

One of many, but I loved that one the most. Because try as she might, she always got the lyrics wrong.

I laugh and I cry. I cry and I laugh.

It’s a simple moment, but God, it feels good. It’s been so long since I’ve felt this free.

I haven’t been able to listen to any of her favourite songs since they were played at her funeral.

So many favourites were abandoned to grief. But now, I play them all.

The bands of my childhood.

ELO’s next.

The Corrs after.

Then Fleetwood Mac.

When I’m finally back home, I just sit and play them on repeat.

Then I go inside the house, and I dance.

Somewhere in the midst of my singing and dancing, a series of thought flows through me:

I did it.

I made it.

I’m going to be okay.

It all happened so slowly that I can’t exactly point to when. It’s not like I don’t miss them anymore. It’s not like there aren’t times that I cry. But it’s no longer consuming—no longer my defining trait.

I no longer hide from my life.

To know love is to know loss. It’s a fracturing experience.

But to love beyond loss, in spite of it, is transformative.

Grief—grieving—is a process of collecting and reassembling the pieces that are left in its wake.

But it is through the tears, the blood and the journey of wading through the darkest oceans, that I’ve learnt something.

As the pieces of a broken life are rearranged, and that final—or rather, that missing piece finally clicks into place; the image you create is not the same one you started with at all. The image you build is itself a fragment—a missing piece in a larger image. A beautiful, messy, living image—or life that you keep building so long as you keep drawing breath.  

‘What Makes You Beautiful’ blasts through the speakers in the living room.

I dance and I sing. I laugh and I cry.

I love you.

I miss you.

Your baby’s going to be fine.