They are (from Left to Right) The Poet, The Priest, The Saved, The Scholar and My Patron Saint. These five, will forever be stamped in my memory as the angels who arrived at a moments notice to hold court and stand guard, keeping me somehow on my feet and in my skin while wishing my darling girl “goodbye”. Having stood beside Mr. J. and then Micachu on the previous afternoon, having absorbed as much as I could stand of their pain, maybe some part of me understood that I would need an army of angels to get me through my own ordeal. Still, I wouldn’t have known to ask for them. And yet, they appeared … each one bringing with him a different innate gift, which with or without their knowledge, completed a sacred circle around her when she and I needed it most. I will never, I suspect, be able to repay them for this moment.
Tonight, for the first time, I was home alone for a couple of hours and the houses was quiet. It is easy to fool the mind into thinking that she will come through the door at any minute with all the energy and pandemonioum of a teenage girl, but I felt the silence closing in. And so I made myself go into her room and touch her things, smell her pillow and kiss the big mirror alongside the row of sticky prints where she blotted her lipstick, a palate of shades from blood red to the palest pink. I bitched at her about the state of her closet and refolded the clean laundry stacked in little piles on her bed. Somehow this helps. Someday soon, I am afraid, I won’t be able to open that door. I am living in this constant state of fear of that day.
A year ago, almost to the day, we lost G.T. and gained Ashlie. Now, we have lost Ashlie and gained nothing. Everyone says that no parent should ever have to outlive their child. What is difficult to explain, I am learning, is how it feels to lose the same child twice. What I do know though, without a doubt, is that I wouldn’t trade this last year (with all its faults and fears, and awkward phases) for anything. She was a wonder to behold.
My dear old friend Geraldine has many quirks, one of which is that she bristles whenever anyone greets her with the words “how are you?”. She has this little speech of admonishment and explanation, which she will deliver upon the occasion of your first offense. After that, if you ever ask that same casual, non-specific question (out of habit, which is part of her point) she will merely frown and grunt and walk or turn away. I wish right now that I could remember the words to that whole speech, because it was brilliant.
How I am right now is compartmentalized and for the moment, I am desperately thankful for that.
Forgive me if this makes little sense. I am well beyond coherence tonight. I am on my way to Oakland Children’s Hospital where they transfered Ashlie by helecopter in the night. She has suffered a major brain injury and the prognosis is not good. Mr. j. will be available by e-mail (via his cell phone) jvilmur@gmail.com but i will be off-line until further notice.
me
Mr. J. took me to see the new Friday The 13th this afternoon. It is, best I can remember, the first time I ever actually saw a slasher flick in the theater. And I would like to give a giant pissed off shout-out to the two late-twenties-or-early-thirties women who in line ahead of us, buying tickets to the show for their two itty bitty little girls (and here, itty bitty means children old enough to walk five blocks to school by themselves in most neighborhoods, but whom you wouldn’t send into a bus station bathroom by themselves), because as much as I intended to enjoy my first ever in-theater slasher flick, at the tender age of thirty-nine, I found myself pulled out of the moment again and again by the thought of those two little girls. It blows my mind to think that to the ratings board and the ticket takers, there is no discernable difference between that woman’s six-year-old and my sixteen-year old. The sex was graphic the gore was horrific, and the melding of sexuality and violence, which is the cornerstone of the genre, a theme grown adults can discuss politely at length over espresso and pie, is so far beyond inappropriate for small children that I honestly wanted Child Protective Services to be standing outside the theater to whip those girls up and away to have their fragile psyches wiped clean.