I can’t remember why I took pictures of the day, but it seemed important at the time. The sky was blue, the clouds cumulus. The fields were green with hope but the yellow of the incoming wheat seemed a cruel laughter of the earth that had just soaked up your blood.
They said we couldn’t have a funeral – too much destruction. The body bag was paisley which still discomfits me. I heard them zip it up all the way across the yard as it sealed up your days.
The detectives in yellow slickers stood around your remains – a band of question marks in the rain. I broke through the yellow tape in my mind. It wasn’t a crime scene I screamed. I put you back together, taped you up with snoopy band-aids, and carried you home in my mind.
But they still asked me where to take your body.
They still took you away and left me there.
I still can’t breathe.
The letter said you loved me, and it wasn’t my fault. I’m your mom. It’s all my fault. I’m still insulted that you told me not to forget Anna. You were my son, my first love. But she is the love of my life. You’ll never father children so you’ll never understand and I’m still mad at you for that. You killed my grandchildren when you took your life.
I’m different now. My middle got rounder and thicker. My face changed; my nose looks crooked, and my lips are out of line.
Your death was a violent blow to me.
I felt my DNA change.
My ears ring the death bell every time I awake.
The flowers look the same today as they did yesterday, and I grow weary of changing them. I never knew they could be as expensive as your high school wardrobe. I envision a life where one day I’ll stop coming here and I’ll let you go for good like you did us.
Today is that day.
I’ve been saying it for some years now. It would be like going out to work without combing my hair or brushing my teeth. This death of yours is just a part of my life now. Damn this choice of yours, I say. But I come anyway.
But today is the day, and I’m sure this time.
You know, I knew you were gone from this earth before it was ever confirmed. Your text message said, “I’m sorry, Mom. I love you” and my heart crashed loud in my ears. I screamed out as I got up to do all the things – call your friends, call the family, and try to find you. I think of how we sent people in every direction so fast – lives scrambled with urgency all over the county driving the highways hoping to see you walking. But you were gone – a twisted game of hide-n-go-seek.
The phone call was so cold. “Chris is dead,” she said. I’ve hated that woman ever since she spoke those words into the phone. I’ve tried to forgive her for your death, but I’d rather stay mad at flesh that is here than flesh that is not. Your death is the most irrational thing that has ever happened to me – wrapped in unharmonious words and sounds, the flat keys of an out of tune piano attempting a haunting e minor – “Chris. Is. Dead.” The whole piano lies in ruins, its guts spilled out on the ground. All my insides are on my outside now and I feel everything.
Do you think if I stop coming here, I’d feel better? …says the living to the dead…
I have sat upon this dirt for six years now. Nothing has changed about your grave. The cross still stands in the same spot. The grass breaks beneath my feet in the cold winter and sprouts up new in the spring. The earth is not dead, only what lies beneath it. The earth is very much alive and moving and spinning and sprouting that awful yellow wheat that laughs and mocks every March. I am learning to laugh back though. I am learning that if I don’t grow, I’ll die too. The first year, I hid from brightness of the sun in a dark pill bottle perfectly prescribed to heal. I almost joined you here.
But I got better.
Sometimes now, when the fields begin their show, I stop and stare back. It is unharmed, unmoved, and continues its transformation into wheat. I have much to learn from its cruel progression.
One final walk down this path before I leave you today.
My father carried me to the crematory to pick up your remains. They handed me a blue bag with a box inside. I was shocked that your body weighed as little as it did the day I carried you out of the hospital in a car seat just twenty-three years prior. Scrambled messages tore my brain to shreds and all I could think of that made sense was that line in Emily Dickinson’s poem, Funeral in my Brain when she said, “and then a plank in reason broke and I fell
down
and
down….”
Daily for the last six years I have come to you and relived your unreasonable death as if I could somehow make you take back some of the pain you left me with.
Down
and
down…
But I’m tired of concrete and earth and your death wearying my soul. I desire to be alive again, dear son.
Today, I’m leaving you here with your choice. I love you. I am going to walk through a wheat field and let yellow life cling to my clothes and scratch my skin. Today is the last time I will live death with you.
Tomorrow I will brush my teeth and wash my face and step into a day that will end without this grave. I am sorry that you made this choice. But today, I choose life.
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