Monday 22 October 2007

She would've been 21 yesterday.

I've never said anything about her for years.

I think about her every day. I dream about her two or three times a week. I see girls of the same age as she would have been having fun in the town, and I cry inside. I even, in unguarded moments, look forward to dying so I can be with her. I long to talk about her with Ann, but we made an agreement all those years ago that neither of us has broken, not even in counselling.

So yesterday I just couldn't stand it any longer.

I didn't go into work - unbeknownst to Ann. I went into town and bought a dozen red roses and went up to the cemetery. I hadn't been up there for a couple of weeks yet the grass was cut and there were fresh flowers in the urn. I just sat by the graveside and cried. For the umpteenth time I went through the final stages of pregnancy, the birth and the forty-three hours that our darling Laura was with us. She looked so beautiful as I held her body in my arms, and in my mind's eye those moments were just as vivid as if they were happening all over again while I sat there on the cold wet grass.

I was in a world of my own, my tears dripping down onto the rose buds. From another world, I could hear someone screaming "Oh God; no, no, don't do this. Go away, go awa ..... before the sound stopped and someone started hitting me, the punches getting gradually weaker. I looked up and saw an exhausted Ann now trying to push me away with a desperate yet pleading look in her eyes. I think it was that look that brought me to my senses.

"She was my daughter too," I sobbed in a voice somewhere between distress and anger.

The life seemed to drain out of Ann. I caught her before she collapsed. No words were appropriate nor necessary. We both needed to be held in our own space not of this world. The hug started off with a desperate intensity, each within our own private misery, travelled through a growing awareness of the other person and ended with compassion and love. After twenty-one years, Laura's loss was beginning a re-unification of mind, body and spirit. We looked at each other, telepathised with ease, smiled and nodded at each other, joined hands and made our way home.

We had so much to catch up on and lay to rest. Two hearts would stop existing and start living again. We both knew it without a word being spoken.

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