No Flowers Please
Bella goes to visit her abusive Uncle's gravestone. Deals with self-harm and child abuse, please stay safe.
Bella wasn't quite sure why she was doing this. Reasons spun around her head in a way that was nearly manic, on a knife edge between sanity and hell again, but Bella wouldn't have it any other way. Closure, curiosity, fear, comfort, attachment, revenge, duty, nostalgia. The buzz words of a psychiatrist. Bella could imagine his face when she told him where she had been. Bella frowned. She knew why she was here, she was a glutton for self-punishment.
She looked up, checking that her motorbike was still propped up against the tree where she had left it. It was still visible over the rows of headstones and memory trees. Bella was in a graveyard, and she was looking for one specific name. She hadn't bought flowers, what was the point? They would only wilt and rot away. It was not like she wanted to honour his memory, and it's not like he would have appreciated the sentiment, even when he was alive. He had been a harsh man, given to mind games and the torment of a frightened girl. Every accident, every slip in his temper was carefully executed. Even he struggled towards the end to keep the secret, people were becoming suspicious, her secondary school teacher had questioned every black eye that he had clumsily given her, forgetting that it would be visible for days to come. And the scars, the boiling water, the lashing of the belt, the cigarette buts, all of which Bella tried desperately to hide. And then came the self-inflicted wounds, pain providing a numbing escape that she failed to understand, but even then she craved it. Bella blinked as the memories washed over her. Even now she could feel the pain and all of it's consequences. The scars were her constant reminder, both physical and mental. She wondered, as she did often, why she chose to work in an emergency department. A place where the reminders of abuse and injury were much too frequent. Perhaps it was the expectation, the consistency that prevented the incidence of a young teenager with white lines across her arms, or a child covered with bruises too often and too regular to be accidents, that prevented the onslaught of memories that accompanied those cases from being a cold sharp shock. Or perhaps, in some sick and dark way, the fact that she was not alone comforted her. Bella hoped that wasn't the case. No, it was the feeling that she could do something to help others who were in that situation, if somehow her "insider knowledge" of the cycle of abuse could prevent it from happening. For another life to be saved, that was why she endured the mental attack from her past every day and every night.
She found the gravestone in the shade of a tree, Bella wasn't sure what type and honestly it did not matter. She had read the funeral announcement in a paper. No flowers please, but donations gladly accepted to Cancer Research UK. Was that his choice? He was never a charitable man, perhaps he had gone soft in his old age. The name, Jerry Marc Hardy and the inscription gone but never forgotten seemed ironically fitting for Bella's situation. She wondered who took the time to chose it, or if the stone mason, in some misguided sympathy for a lonely old man, chose it for himself. The headstone was simple, small and untended. And in Bella's mind, that was all her uncle deserved. She felt no feelings of closure, comfort or attachment to the site or even the body preserved below. She left feeling no different than when she had come, no more or less curious, no sense of duty or desire for revenge. The psychiatrist couldn't be right every time.