JRR Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

My child died and I wasn’t there to say goodbye. To tell her how much I adored her. How she changed my life the very moment I first saw her pink, crumpled face. No, before that. When I decided to keep her, happy accident that she was.

And now she is gone and everything is dark and filled with shadows of what was, what should have been. Shadows of the future that I catch glimpses of whenever I hear someone singing. She had the most beautiful voice and I miss it so.

Adrianna had to identify the body because I was too far away to get back in time. It haunts me, that image I will never see. Of two women separated by the split second that turns life into death, one carrying that moment around with them forever. Never being able to unsee the cold, brutalized body of her best friend. It should have been my duty, my burden, but I am also so selfishly grateful I didn’t have to see her that way. That I at least get to think of her alive and full of joy.

Hospitals are hateful places. Not least the stench of antiseptic and death, but the strange stillness that seems to cloak everything. No one talks at a normal volume. It’s all hushed conversations in the corners of rooms. Making up sentences that contain a multitude of sins—false hope, lies, counter-lies and bucketloads of positivity thrown in for good measure.

But I have to be here, for her, for Emily. Her body is being held together by so many different materials, I’m not sure I can remember them all. All of her injuries. All of her broken bones and torn muscles and skin that the doctors have stitched back together like she’s a patchwork doll. Her beautiful face. Her innocence. Shattered the very moment a stranger took the turn too fast.

She keeps pointing to the window. She likes to watch the birds even though it makes her cry. I’m terrified of what will happen next, because she hasn’t said a word in over two weeks and part of me thinks she never will. Not because she can’t, but because she has nothing left to say. What are words other than an expression of feeling, and how are you supposed to convey those feelings when they are raging inside of you, shredding your heart and burning your soul?

Too many people. We are surrounded by too many well-wishing people, who want to help, want to touch, want to comfort, but none of them know how. None of them will ever be able to fill the bottomless pit of despair that Emily and I are now trapped within.

I must take her away. Far from all the reminders of home. All the people and places she knows. Give her a chance, a fighting chance, to recover. Give me a chance to figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do now.