Grieve

by lemon sparrow

I was named Grieve, my mother once told me, because that was what she did after she gave birth to me. After the nurses had left, my father gone home, and I been tucked away in a darkened room with all the other babies, she curled up on her bed and she cried. This is not to imply she did not love me - she thought, as all mothers do, that hers was the most beautiful baby on earth - rather, she cried because she did not believe she could be a good mother to me.

As it happened, she was a very good mother, if distracted and inattentive at times. She would often stare at me, very still and quiet, and it was only after I called her name that she started back to reality, escaping in an instant whatever thoughts she had stored up in her head. They were not good thoughts, I knew; I remember coming into my parents’ room one night, the floor strewn with shadows cast by the moonlight, and finding her sitting up in bed with tears glistening over her cheekbones. Though I was hardly five years old at the time, that image of her stands out with painful clarity in my memory; she was not my mother, I felt, but another woman who had borrowed her skin.

Only much later did I discover the reason for her fear, and it was with the expected mix of horror and disbelief that I learned I had, years ago, an older sister, and how she had died.

My father told me the story just after my twelfth birthday, seated at the kitchen table while my mother slept down the hall. His voice approached a whisper, and in the dimming light the whole affair seemed decidedly secretive.

“She was pregnant with you when it happened,” he told me, rocking an empty mug between his hands. “She was in the kitchen making dinner, and had lain Emi on our bed for a nap. We had a crib, but she liked to lay with us on the bed sometimes, and your mother didn’t think anything of it.” He paused, a bitter smile coming over his face at the next memory.

“We were going to have lasagna for dinner. It had been a favourite for both of us, but… I don’t know. After that we just never had it again. It tasted bad somehow - tainted with bad memories, I guess; in the same way that we associate a food with illness, so did your mother and I associate lasagna with Emi. But anyway. Emi fell off the bed, and,” he paused. “You know that hat stand we have near the door? It used to be beside our bed. Emi hit her head on it, and… babies’ skulls are so soft, and the base of the hat stand is steel. The fall dented her skull. There was no blood, but when your mother got to the hospital they told her Emi had sustained major brain damage. Emi hung on for a while, almost a day, but eventually she just… died.” His voice was soft for the last word, and in it I heard an echo of my mother - sad, weak, and hopeless.

That was the first time he’d told the story to anyone, though I didn’t know it then; at the time I was only a little unsure of my father’s actions. They were the sort of nervous movements I rarely saw him make, that I had not yet come to associate with him. My mother made such movements often - fidgeting, touching edges as though to reassure herself that they still existed, that she still existed, and had not yet slid off the earth or dropped into a strange wasteland, with nothing but flat surfaces and ghosts - but my mother was different from my father in every way possible, she soft and weak where he was strong and decisive.

“People whispered about it when you were little, but your mother and I did our best to quiet them,” my father went on. “We wanted to protect you, and though I now realize how silly that was, it seemed like a good idea.

“And eventually you did forget, if you had ever remembered.”

The following silence was awkward; it pressed in and slowed the world. When I felt it had passed I stood and walked to my bedroom, leaving my father sitting at the table with the mug in his hands, if only to have something to hold.

x

A baby cannot reason in the way older human beings can; though Emi may have been frightened, she could not have known she was dying. Any other thoughts were too cruel, and I tried very hard not to dwell on them. But they kept coming back, playing over my closed eyelids: my sister’s face - which I had never seen - wide, clear eyes staring over the edge of my parent’s sheets.

What had she felt? When the lamp stand drove into her head, what had she thought? Had she known she’d been injured at all? A negative answer made death merciful, and I settled for it in a way my mother had never been able to.

There were no remnants of my sister in the house - no photos, a suspicious absence of memorabilia, even my own baby toys and clothes had been brand new - though only recently did I find out why. I know now what I did not know then - that my mother blamed herself an inordinate amount for Emi’s death, even attempting suicide several times before my fourth birthday. She had packed up Emi’s things and given them to charity, in an attempt to forget. I remember the pills she took to keep the sadness at bay; rows and rows of bottles stored up in the medicine cabinet.

She did her best for me, but in her heart she had fallen short of expectations. She hoped to make up for Emi’s death, though I now believe no amount of mothering could have brought her peace; in part because she would not allow it, but also because I - a healthy, well-cared for child - proved she had failed; that Emi had died neither through chance nor twist of fate, but though negligence and bad mothering.

Eventually, I came to blame myself for my mother’s condition. I imagined myself (incorrectly) to be an extension of my sister; assuming that whenever my mother saw me she was overwhelmed by the past. I imagined all sorts of things to be the cause of her depression: an innate predisposition to it, inadequacy, old age… me; but in truth it was none of these things, only a sad story of lingering guilt, of a child’s death and the family left behind.

x

“Hey Mom, could I borrow your hairbrush?”

My mother, her eyes hazy with drugs, nodded and then returned to staring out the window. It looked out into the backyard: grass and a scattering of wildflowers. She’d had a garden out there at one point; the wooden labels and string were still there, as were patches of dirt worn smooth with rain but which had once, years ago, supported a crop of tomatoes.

I was fifteen.

I took the hairbrush and left, trying not to notice how fragile my mother looked. How broken. Since my twelfth birthday, I had come to view her as one might view a treasured porcelain doll; she should be treated gently, because if she were to break….

I doubt she realized there was anything wrong with her. She had receded so far into herself and the past, and by that point we had grown used to her sedentary lifestyle. She was up around eleven, then lay in bed and ate soda crackers for most of the day. She rarely spoke, and when she did speak it was about the strangest things, events which I suspect happened in her own childhood. I was never sure how to react when this happened.

Late that afternoon (it was a Saturday), she came into the kitchen. As usual, she pulled a box of crackers from the cupboards, but instead of retreating to her room she came to sit beside me on the couch.

I looked up, waited a moment, then went back to my book.

“Do you know why I named you Grieve?” my mother asked suddenly, and I raised my head to find her staring at me, her eyes bright.

I shook my head.

“Well, it’s because that’s what I did after you were born. I loved you though, you know -very, very much. I just didn’t think I could be a good enough mother….” She stroked my face with one hand. Her fingers were cool and thin, and smelled like cucumber lotion. “That made me sad,” she said. “Do you know why?” She received another negative; though I could guess, I thought it better not to speak. It was not often that my mother spoke to me like this; she spoke with my father a bit, but it was as though I had faded into the wallpaper, just another child she wanted to forget; I was unused to this sudden attention, and unsure how to respond. Sometimes I think she only wanted a listening ear, but at times she reacted to silence with heavy sighs and doleful looks over her shoulder as she went away, as though she’d been terribly disappointed.

“I was scared of being a bad mother. I thought I would be, and I was afraid that you’d grow up to be naughty, or you’d get hurt or something.” She smiled, vaguely. “I haven’t been a very good mother to you, have I?”

I said nothing.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that. It’s not fair to you, and of course you won’t tell the truth, because you’re too good to your poor old mother….”

I looked away, trying to keep her in the area of my mind I felt most comfortable with her occupying; to keep her quiet, drugged, inattentive. She wasn’t who I thought she was at all, and that frightened me.

I liked looking through our old photo albums, at moments of time frozen between thick, leather-bound covers, and at the people who existed there. In those moments, my mother was a different person. She was carefree and happy, in ways she never was anymore. It was strange to see a woman I had never known, and likely never would know, wearing my mother’s face. The woman I knew was stuck in the days following Emi’s death, in a perpetual state of sadness and shock which not even drugs could lift her out of.

“You’re too good to me,” she whispered again, and lay her head on my shoulder.

x

I avoided my mother after that, though I don’t quite remember why (only that, whenever I saw her, guilt and confusion gathered until I felt my stomach would burst onto the carpet). I spent a lot of time secluded in my room instead, surrounded by books. I regret that now. There were signs she was willing to open up, but because my father worked most of the time and my mother, for whatever reason, never gathered the courage to knock on my door, the chance was lost.

I was sixteen when she killed herself.

Doctors ruled it an accidental overdose, but I knew better. She’d been taking those pills for years; she wouldn’t take five of them on accident. No, living here had simply become too much for her; she’d slid backward into herself, into that flat, featureless wasteland she’d always been so scared of. And she was never coming back.

Though I mourned her, I was, in a way, glad for her. She hadn’t been happy here for a long, long time, and if she could not find her dead daughter in the afterlife - as I knew she hoped - then she would at least find a measure of relief.

I think about her death every now and then, wondering what she felt, what she thought. Lying in bed at night, I picture her face in those last moments before the drugs took hold. Always, she looks peaceful. She has gone to the place she wanted most to go, to be with the child some part of her died with. Though I mourned her, I was, in a way, glad for her. She hadn’t been happy here for a long, long time, and if she could not find her dead daughter in the afterlife - as I knew she hoped - then she would at least find a measure of relief.

finis