I didn’t sleep last night. Not last night. Just like three years ago. I’m wearing the same blue night shirt, laying on the same pillows, thinking about the same things. I wasn’t surprised when the bright sunlight came in through the curtains, telling me that the dawn had come. The snow clouds soon choked out the sun, casting a haze over the sky. The snow storm is more than ten hours away, but the clouds have completely covered the sky.
I think back on the night, three years ago, and the tears don’t even come. As hard as I try, I am jaded from the scene. I cannot cry about it anymore. I’ve exhausted all angles of what happened three years ago, and I can no longer find myself guilty of anything wrong. There is no reason for my sorrow. There is no reason for my tears. So why couldn’t I sleep last night? Were the ghosts of one of a thousand regrets walking the halls, scratching on the door to the bedroom? What did they want? The answers?
I am tired now. I think sleep will come. I have my morning meds to take, and then it’s off to bed, to sleep away the day. Sleep like I did three years ago. I have forgiven myself, so I can repeat my past. I can re-enact it every year and try to change what I do. Change the past so I’m not forced to remember how it really is. Take a few blue pills to erase the memories and numb my brain. Become a living corpse, walking the halls with those ghosts late into the night.
But I cannot lay down and sleep.
I don’t deserve to sleep.
No matter how many of those blue pills I take, I cannot erase the memories I want erased. They pick and choose what parts of my brain that are permanently gone, and I have no choice in the matter, except the choice to take the pills. Those memories I want gone haunt me. Perhaps they are the ghosts that keep me awake at night?
The most haunting is what she did and said before she died. What my little PoRo said to me before she died. When she became sick with cancer the first time, she was happy. She said cancer was nothing and when she got well we could be a family again. Momma wouldn’t cry anymore and daddy wouldn’t be ‘away’ as much anymore. She got well. Then she relapsed almost a year ago. This time it was different. She was sad before we even took her to the doctor. Before the diagnosis ever came. After the diagnosis, I asked her why she was sad. Surely a second battle with cancer wouldn’t scare her.
What she said made my heart ice over… “Momma…I’m not going to make it this time. I’m going to die, and there’s no Rainbow Bridge, there’s no misty field surrounded by mountains where we play while we wait for you and daddy to come. When I die, I’m going to be gone forever, and I’ll never see you or daddy or anyone ever again and they’ll never see me again.”
Those words hit hard when I woke to the silent house, when PoRo was gone forever. “…I’m gone forever and I’ll never see you again…and you’ll never see me again…”
Those words don’t bring tears to my eyes. Am I immune? Has my soul dissolved in a beaker of acid? Or will they just scratch at my door late at night on the eve of December 28th, 2010?
Over Christmas, I visited PoRo’s grave. I brought her blue flowers. She loved blue flowers, though blue wasn’t her favourite colour. Her grave was decorated. Kids from her class had been by to leave stuffed animals, letters, someone had left her a can of Pepsi, propped against the cold, icy marble stone which bears her name, the dates, and her favourite Lord Byron lines. I knelt down in the snow, the coldness immediately radiated up my knees and through my shins and legs. I brushed some snow aside and laid the flowers on the slushy ground at the foot of the stone. “Merry Christmas, PoRo…Where ever you may be. Momma still loves you,” I whispered. Her daddy approached me from behind and told me it was time to go. I wasn’t wearing a coat, I wasn’t wearing gloves, I had walked most of the way there, in crocs, no socks, the snow had soaked the legs of my jeans through. How long had I been kneeling there? I don’t remember the walk back to his car. I don’t remember what he replied to me when I asked why he didn’t bring his little girl something. A blanket, a stuffed animal, didn’t he know she was probably cold and scared down in that dark grave covered with snow?
I recovered, eventually. I slept for a few hours. When I woke up, I played with my Christmas gifts. I ate candy. I frolicked in the snow with what’s left of my family. But the ghosts returned. PoRo hasn’t even been dead a year, but she has joined the ghosts that haunt me on this eve, and forever will.