What It Was
I try to wear this new lipstick, hoping it will bring me back to myself. Maybe vanity will be its own distraction. You are still you, I tell myself. When I bought it, the lady at the counter was especially kind to me. I wanted to grab her arm and ask, “Do you know? Can you tell?” Does grief follow me around like a perfume, like a ghost?
I stop short of thinking that I can actually do this, can actually live as a mother without her child. The knot in my stomach returns and I have to go to your room, with the blue airplane poster. I cry. I scream into your pillow.
I think about how tall you would be now. The lipstick smears the pillowcase, all over blue and silver stars. Every time I put it on, it seems to say “You’re just going to cry me off.”
Henry, I’m here, I whisper. Do you hear it? Who is keeping you warm, who is holding your hand? They could never know you like I do. We knew you. Everything. Each freckle and eyelash.
My littlest son, I would have done anything to save you.
There was nothing anyone could have done, the doctor gently tells us.
Viral meningitis.
It is rare, and rarely fatal. For you, for us, it was not rare enough.
It struck swiftly, silently, like a slippery fish we couldn’t catch. You fell away from us, not slowly, but all at once.
I say the phrase, viral meningitis, feeling the words on my lips. How do I connect those words with the sweet boy I knew, his face upturned to smile at me?
Losing you is an offense to all mothers, it is a crime against motherhood itself. Not only have I lost my baby, but my baby has lost his mother. Nothing, simply nothing, could be more cruel than this.
I think about you as I sit and look out your bedroom window. The pear tree is green, gorgeous and full. The best view of this is from your room and you should be here to see it. Pears turn bitter in my mouth, in a way I never noticed before.
I walk the puppy you asked for but never got to meet, I water the spring flowers on the porch. We try to make happy memories, as a family of three, in cities you will never see. I tend to the grief, I mother it. I pull the lipstick out and reapply.
