When Love is Done
"The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one:
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done."
- Francis William Bourdillon
Books dripped from her. Constantly.
If it wasn't for the near perpetual splatter of rain, our home's predominant sound would've been that of books—slapped, fluttered, or thumped onto the surfaces of our home.
I could not procure enough of them for her, and she, not consume them near fast enough. She knew the constant bite of a wordy hunger.
You'd find them in the bathroom, tucked beside the toilet, damp from uncertain condensation, or nestled in the covers of her bed. Juvenile lovers.
The only ones she ever had.
When chores required doing, you'd find her nose deep in a page of something well flattened on our kitchen table, tea in one hand, the other swirled in a strand of her long, auburn hair. "What?" she'd ask defensively, worried eyes wide, wondering what thing that wasn't reading, you wanted her to do.
Her room was a reader's archeological dig. Layers of books, stacked in preference, by age, rose in stalagmites. They were met by stalactites of fanciful things she'd pinned to the ceiling: drying roses and rosemary, lemon balm, the crisp shells of stolen lantern flowers, maple leaves once florid, now brown. "I like the smell," she'd say, as they crumbled under the furnace's stale air. An informal potpourri that snowed onto open pages.
In my insistent, annual excavations, we found uncertain treasures: books long overdue to some library, somewhere we went once, some returned with profuse apologies, some guiltily kept. Most of her allowance went to books, and near constant tithe to fines.
We had twelve years of her.
A solid six were spent reading.
I wish I'd interrupted more of it.
Or read with her. It was just such a profound relief, when literacy found her, leaving me time to breathe.
I can't forget the first time she picked up the words off a page.
I'd paused at the end of a sentence, her younger siblings whining for space on my lap. She stopped too, eyes on mine. When I raised my eyebrows in invitation, she flicked her gaze down at the page and then up again, offering me the word on breathy lips.
"Eggs," she said. The syllable wobbled. Hoping for approval.
It was magic.
I regret not telling her how much.
I was always so preoccupied. With dinner, the squabbles of her siblings, chores, or work. My own reading.
There were few questions after she found her way into the world of the printed word. Perhaps a few whined but-I-want-you-to-read-to-me's when she was tired. Not many.
I rarely had time for them.
She found her heroines. Anne. I smiled at that one. Claire's hair, so distinct, so very beautifully bronzed, was a gift, not the unhappy distinction I'd feared it might be at school.
We've since left her room largely alone.
Her brother and sister avoid it.
Mostly.
Sometimes, on particularly light evenings, they wander through its dusted deletrius, touching lightly.
It would drive her crazy, if she'd lasted to see it. She hated having them touch her things.
Don't all siblings?
When she'd gotten sick, there'd been a careful space of respectful tenderness from Finn and Alina. Of peaceful offerings: The last bit of ice cream from a sibling's bowl. A precious curl of arbutus bark, found, and hoarded for writing secretive notes on. The best seat on the couch.
The demands of illness shifted those feelings, though, and there were often more meltdowns than understanding.
In all the times I'd heard of distant acquaintances and their "battles" with cancer, I never understood that it wasn't some short ordeal. It was a marathon you ran exhausted, while the world shrugged, and then piled its expectations on you.
Our family understood-always. Close friends approached something like it.
And acquaintances were kind. For the first while. Then they couldn't understand why we were late. Or didn't get things done. Why we didn't host play dates anymore, or go to parties.
There were only so many times you could explain that a cold could kill your child.
Only so many.
And that's what it was, really, that took her.
Or her love of books, one or the other, depending on how you look at it.
We'd had to pull her from school. A wrenching choice we oscillated over, over and over again. She cried over it. Wailed at us to not do it, but it was just too dangerous, and even with all her solemn twelve-year old promises to wash her hands and never take off the face mask, we couldn't.
It turned us inwards. I stopped work, too, our lives shrunk to the orbit of our home, hospital appointments, and her.
I hadn't expected the blessing to be that she treasured her siblings. They were her only friends, the few from school visiting infrequently, busy with their own flickering constellations of new and inconstant confidantes. These stars drifted quickly, and soon were gone entirely.
Finn had come home with a book from the school library, selected for its popularity and pre-eminence amongst his peers. He'd been the envy of them all, getting to it first, but it was far above his reading level, and he was beside himself in anxiety, trying to wrestle with its words.
"S'OK Finn, I'll read it to you," Claire said, "c'mon."
He'd fought her with a muttered, "I'll do it myself."
She'd eschewed the traditional eyeroll and shrug, and with a far greater wisdom than I'd ever imagined her in possession of, said, "yes, you can. Show me."
He'd stared at her, and having had his bluff called, brought the book over.
"You start," she'd hushed out with her precious air.
So he did. When he met some wordy thicket, too dense for his tongue to master, Claire would nudge him with the first syllable, giving him space to test his capacity. She was a natural teacher.
This magic ritual lasted almost ten days, each of them savouring the delicacy of their wordy banquet.
"Do you like the book?" I'd asked her, one sunny afternoon, shortly before Finn and Alina were expected home.
"God no, Mom," she'd snorted, giving me a full serving of eye-roll. "It's about idiots in flying cars."
"Mm," I'd offered, as non-committally as I could. Parenthood required some careful neutrality when it came to books.
Then she'd yawned, looking ready to sleep, but fighting it, I could tell, waiting on her brother.
They were only a few words in when he sneezed.
I didn't think anything of it.
But then, a few days later, he got sick.
And then Claire got sick.
We'd been lucky. She'd weathered colds before, in her immuneless state, and survived. We thought it would be the same.
The hospital admission didn't phase us. It annoyed, certainly, another inconvenience layered on others.
She didn't even make it to the ICU.
She'd put her book down one evening, Edward and I sitting in her room, murmuring quietly over how we were going to get Finn to his swimming lesson the next day. Alina and Finn had wandered off to one of the family lounges, bored with our talk and the small room.
"Tired," she murmured.
"Sure," Edward said. He carefully transferred her book, face-down—never bookmarked—so she could pick it up again easily if she wanted, onto the bedside table.
"Re-reading this again?" he asked, teasing her, seeing the title.
She was too tired to rebut this perpetual question, so she gave him the briefest of eyerolls, before her eyelids fluttered shut.
The lights lowered, we sat in the semi-darkness, whispering through her sleep.
When it got late, Edward corralled her siblings, and took them home. I curled up on the chair that made do as a bed, and tried to make my own sleep.
Everyone had been so focused on her lungs, no one had given thought to her heart.
And it was this that found its end that night, wearied by the chemo, or the cancer, or the final insult of a cold, swimming into a watery pneumonia of her lungs. We never found out.
It just stopped.
Such things are quiet.
Peaceful, even.
But not in hospitals.
I wish we'd been home.
I wish we'd been able to wake up in the morning and find her, gone to sleep forever, the words she treasured beside her.
I didn't.
I woke to the shriek of the alarm, the door banging open, the brutality of bright lights, and a crowd of people whose names I didn't know, ripping off her gown, touching her, inserting things, and finally assaulting her body with electricity, while I watched, silent, transfixed by fear.
It was for nothing.
I can only hope she was gone by then, that these last indignities didn't touch anything but a corpse.
They tell me it took ten minutes.
It felt like forever.
By the time the last violator-come-helper had walked away, her body had been covered, someone extending some courtesy to her in death that had been absent in her last flickers of life.
Her book had been knocked to the floor, and it was the first of many waves of grief that took me, to realize she would never wake to care.
I still care.
It's flat, that book, opened to the page I think she left it at. Set by her bed at home.
I refuse to keep a shrine, like I know some do, but it's the one thing that I leave. A tribute to her last moment, open for her eyes, wherever they are.
The house is still full of books, less treasured by her siblings than her, but they're readers still.
Alina will lose herself to novels, and I'll find her swimming in a dusty Nancy Drew, a near approximation of her sister, with a soft "Mm?" on her lips, looking up at me.
I try not to cry in those moments. To let her be her own person, not the ghost of a sibling I see with less careful eyes.
No one tells you that grief is just love, walking around in your head, when it's gone.
Maybe it's just me.
I think I love my other two children too much. Squeeze them too hard when hugs are offered. Hold too tight in other ways. They complain that I don't let them do things, that Claire had more freedom.
I don't reply, with my gut, that such freedom left her dead.
No.
I try to live as I should, but Claire is a morbid thought, constantly drawing me to the contemplation of my own, distant grave. The pull of my living two is a constant counterbalance, dragging me back to life, and books, and tea, and laughter, but Claire's pull is hard to break.
I know, in all the ways that matter, that that love is done.
So I leave you with these words, as she lived with such things, hoping she lives still in them, in you.
Author's note: Thank you, everyone, for all your kind words. This is a purely fictional story, not based on personal experience, beyond that of parenting. As always, I take the words you leave as payment in kind for the writing I do.
~ Erin
[AT ErinAffleckTarbuck on FB, AT EAffleck on Twitter, FlamingMaple on Tumblr]
DISCLAIMER: S. Meyer owns Twilight. No copyright infringement intended.