meant to be yours | d.w

52

"By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future"

Rebecca Davis

1964

I don't know how to play the part of the grieving girl. Yeah, I cry whenever his name is brought up. I keep that solemn expression with me at all times. But I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I never thought my relationship with my mother could worsen. For we don't scream at each other in the dead of night, nor argue; but we refuse to look each other in the eye. We don't say a word to each other, even when the nights feel long and forlorn

But what's the worst about it is just how much more superficial we have become. Mother tries to pretend like everything is okay. Like Dad didn't just die. Like Mother didn't forbid us to go to the funeral. (She didn't want us seeing our father in a casket, though it was the finest casket money could buy.) I personally didn't see the point of everything. It's not like he would come back and yell at us for tainting his image if we saw him, dead in a mediocre casket

As every day begins to worsen, so does Mothers mental state. It has been almost two months since his passing, and all she does is stare blankly at the wall, typically doing some useless hobby that gets us nowhere. It doesn't matter if she's outside, grocery shopping or what not. Mentally, she is lost in space as she stares at the blank wall. She always puts on a face for friends at church, or members of her book club; but when she gets home, it's as if everything normal has disintegrated.

Every day, as I would walk through the halls, I thought about how I never imagined that I would become a walking cliche. The girl with a little brother and a Mother who can, in no way, do this all on her own.

Everyone says how sorry they are. That they can't imagine how painful this must be, how they send their condolences, that they believe my Father is up in the sky, looking down upon us as he smiles.

Well, if that's the case, I hope heaven isn't real. Because if my Father somehow got a place there, I would lose every ounce of trust in this system. It's all bullshit to me, the idea that my Father has somehow been redeemed.

I started skipping classes regularly. The bathroom became a sanctuary for me as I let the girl I really was fall to pieces. For everyone believed I was grieving for one single man. One single man who wasn't who I thought he was. In reality, when I would go to the bathroom, all I could see was the fireworks in the distance at the hotel and a mixture of gunshots as I heard them scream.

Their screams were blood curdling that night. When I got home in my bed on that night, I thought about how many of them had families. I know she did.

Nothing mattered to me anymore. Even as months droned on, I would never have that same initial spark I could sense when I was alone, or with her. Life was so simple, yet so complicated at that time. That time of simplicity. Now, I am simply just trying to get through the day, praying that every day goes by faster than the next.

But that's my future. And today, we will focus on a day where I went through the second stage of grief.

Anger.

At first, denial swept through me like it was natural. I wanted to believe that Meghan had not just died. That she was really at home, safe and sound in her bed. I wanted to believe that my Father lived up to the expectations I had of him as a child. We often believe that people we love do not have the ability to be cynical. If only this was true.

Mother had started picking up a pointless routine. To her, it distracted her and made her feel like everything was normal and okay. But in my opinion, it only pushed her to ignore what was happening with our family.