Navigating Sensory Memories is Tricky and Hard and Wonderful
Grieving a child is an act of the senses.
In the first few weeks after my daughter died, I could still smell her. I’d walk into Ana’s bedroom and inhale deeply, immersing myself in the rapidly fading traces of her scent — rose candles, champa body oil, the floral soap she’d loved. I also smelled the lingering evidence of her sickness — the odd scent of canned oxygen, stale air from days inside, the menthol cream she used to help with pain.
In those earliest days my senses ached for her as much as my heart and mind did. Once, I crawled into her closet and smelled her dirty laundry, her towels, her half-used tubes of lip gloss. Any fresh evidence that remained of her— the hair in her hairbrush, a discarded tissue, a sock crumpled at the end of her bed — soothed the ache.
The hamper full of her dirty laundry, the rumpled sheets that held the echo of her shape, the heat and odor of her candles as I burned them one by one — all of these things kept me connected to her physical presence.
But, eventually, I burned all the candles down. I washed and folded her last load of dirty clothes. I stripped her bed, dismantled it, and threw it away.
The smells faded, turning from something familiar to something other — something…
