Murder
For 25 years, I thought I’d killed my grandmother. Many years after she had died, I had therapy for it. I can still feel the guilt of it, even now. As an eleven-year-old, I was pushed into a corner and I said what I thought. If she were here now, she’d say sorry. And would have said sorry to me every hour, of every day since. So would I. Back then, we were both so scared, horrified in our own worlds and words. She had been unwell; I didn’t know how unwell. She didn’t either.
She was with me, on my shoulder and in my eyes when I was on a Sunday morning run through Vancouver 6 years ago. There was no resentment there, only love. She was so grateful to be seeing Vancouver: the sea wall run to Stanley Park and back to my hotel. A 6-mile run with my grandmother, 32 years and one day after she had been killed by me.
Apart from that therapist years ago, I’ve not told anyone about this until now. My brother was there, in that room as a witness back in 1982; but I bet he won’t remember.
“Say it! On my life, that’s what happened!” She said.
Her glare had less care and more hurt in them than I’d ever seen before in those coffin eyes. The room was softly lit by 2 lamps in opposite corners. The white artexed ceiling threw long shadows from its textured peaks. My brother was a skinny teen, under a D.I.Y. bowled black mop. His smirk was where an angry red face had been moments before. A fallen petal from the pink and purple flowers lay next to the cut-glass vase. Instantly, those flowers had become the only beauty that remained in the room. The look of horror on my face could only hint at the depth of horror I was feeling. No face could show that much horror. My grandmother had aged beyond her 65 years. Her grey wig suited her but it was not the hair I’d always remembered her to have. Her face was ashen, her skin translucent, blue veins showing through. She was wearing a well-worn mustard coloured polo-neck sweater that was two sizes too big for her. It had a small hole in the seam of the sleeve, where the tissue she always kept up one sleeve poked through. A brown pillbox on the bedside table, next to a teacup with tea that had gone cold, a brown ring just above the level of the forgotten tea.
“Yes” I said.
Her face changed and turned away, but not enough for me to not see she’d begun to cry. In that moment I’d realised what I’d said. What it meant. A mouse in a trap.
Four months later, my grandmother died. I was heartbroken. And I still am. I’d never felt so much love from anyone than from her. Unconditional. Un tempered. She once joked in her house in happier times when my grandfather was still alive, that she’d kill me with love. Then played by kissing my face all over as I sat on her lap in front of the log fire in the kitchen.
I’d killed her for real. Not the cancer. I had. I had put that tumour in her brain and made it inoperable. A horrible secret that plagued me with guilt and shame for decades.
It hung over me from the age of 11 until… maybe until now. Longer than 25 years. I wonder how different my life would have been if that self-imposed sentence and that horrible conversation had never happened. How differently would I have felt about everything in all that time since. How much time and effort I had put into making up for it, that only compounded it. I wonder if I’d be sitting here now, writing on this sofa, in this house, in this country. I wonder if I’d have been married. Had kids. Maybe divorced. Maybe dead. There’s no way of knowing.
But carrying this guilt of being my grandmother’s murderer when I’d had nothing to do with her death is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
For years, I’d thought it was true. For years, I’ve thought other things about me were true. I had no idea that thought worked like that, in me and in every human being. We think things, and sometimes we think that makes it true.
I’m seeing more and more that every bad feeling I have about me is a thought that looks real. Looking real. Feeling real.
And simply not true.
