Condemnation
You are beautiful perfect entitled. You have come from a funeral of a fifteen year old. You talk about the parents, how did they not see this day coming? Did they, in their certainty of righteousness, brush away the fears of a young troubled girl? They must have, you say. That’s how they are, these parents you speak of, they are quick to judge, adamant that they and they alone know what is right.
I listen to this sad story, sucking in my breath when you speak with a certain ghoulish grief of her death (she jumped) and it only occurs to me in delayed anger that you are even quicker to condemn. You, who have nearly lost your own child, you who speak of the shock when you saw her lying there, thinking you might never see her open her eyes again. And yet you see no irony in speaking of these other unfortunates, condemned as such to a life of guilt and grief and more days to live than they care to think about. You speak with the arrogance of the living, the alert, the careful. You, who are so tuned to your children’s thoughts and feelings and emotions. You, who cannot fathom the split second it takes for a fifteen year old to give up and jump. I bite my tongue, I swallow my words and I force myself to make sympathetic noises, in false empathy with what you have had to go through. This is all about you, your dismay, your disquiet, your disconnect.
You know nothing of my life and I don’t trouble you with the details. I know you have imagined the loss of your child. We all have: it comes as a bonus to the no holds barred, down and dirty life we choose when we decide to be parents. But you can’t know what it means to stop breathing halfway through a breath. Or how time stops and falls like a stone, sinking you as it goes. You know nothing about nightmares. You know nothing about drowning. You imagine you know how they feel but there is no imagination brave enough to cope with this. The child she grew in her body is dead. Dead because he or she no longer wanted life. The life they gave is thrown away, the gift rejected, refused. And yet, you share a casual judgement of these poor souls with us over drinks and crisps. You know it all, don’t you?
I want to tell you about unending grief. Unreasonable guilt. Redemption and rejection and the howl in my throat. And it’s not even a child I lost. But mostly I want to tell you about compassion. That afternoon I sat on the porch, tears burning in my eyes while gossipy women quickly and casually judged a mother. They blamed her for choosing to live her life. They blamed her for a son’s death. She sat unhearing, unseeing, repeating his name to herself. They condemned her and equally, she condemned herself to a life of self flagellation. They forgot his tantrums, his demons, his blackmail. They remembered only her supposed betrayal of motherhood, her flaunting of an intellect they neither cared to understand nor admired.
I want to tell you about guilt. The kind that hollows out a person and leaves behind a husk. Guilt that he didn’t do enough, didn’t provide enough. Guilt that she let her anger over ride her fear. Guilt that the scrawled poem, the half hearted slitted wrists, the premonitions, were, if not unheeded, then at least lost in the swamp of hope that this too would pass. Guilt that the last time we spoke, his voice was so dispirited, drowned in pain, a muttered request for a cool drink. No hint of the high spirits, his cruel humour laid aside, the elegant shoulders drooping in resignation. And yet, I did nothing. Just turned away from his hopelessness and escaped into my life. Playing my music so loud that the sound of the bathroom stool falling over, the whisper of life leaving our home, both were drowned out. Was that song the last thing he heard? Unforgiving guilt that brings a lump to the throat a lifetime later.
I want to tell you about walking in another’s shoes for the rest of my days. Of an imagination overtaken by his last moments, a film that plays in my dreams and before my waking eyes. An endless loop, as if it were only yesterday that I saw him lying there, the certainty of his forever imprinting on my brain. I want to tell you about compensating for this loss, never filling the void, never measuring up, and never giving up.
But I sit there and I smile weakly and I commiserate falsely. I say nothing, do nothing and inside I am screaming in rage and tearing at my skin in anguish. My face remains a mask. I have had long years of practice and a collection of masks to show for it. This mask is the polite, not quite interested one that fools you into thinking I only care very little. Or that I care at all about your stupid mindless response to a child’s death. That I care about your perfect parenting and your imperfect understanding.
I write this a month later, and my skin crawls as I remember that evening of fine drinks and fake smiles. I hear the condemnation in your voices. I see the smug supercilious expressions on your faces. I wonder how you might have reacted if I’d told you my story. And then I think that I would never tell you my story. All you will ever get is the first thin layer of me. You are not welcome underneath. You may not condemn and accuse, you may not judge and use another family’s pain to validate your perfect world, your perfect life.
I do not forget. I will not forgive. All your explanations, your platitudes, do not absolve you. You are no longer welcome in my heart.