Confessions of Grief: A Short Story
By Ysabella Susim
Denial.
This is what rushes through me when I see her, standing alive and flush before me. I take a tentative step towards her, hardly believing she was real.
"Are you a dream? You must be, to be here. You're dead. You're not real." I am overcome with grief when I realize that the phantasm in front of me is no more than a mirage, a creation of my own imagination. Never before has a dream featuring my late mother been so real, so vivid. The dreamscape around me was familiar. I stood beneath the threshold of my house, my hand still on the handle of the door I'd just opened. I remember; the bell had rung, and I had gotten up to answer. I quickly look up at the apparition. "You came to visit me then? I haven't dreamt of you in a while now." The spirit of my mother laughed heartily.
"Silly girl," she giggled, and I was in awe of how real her laugh sounded, "I'm not a ghost, and this isn't a dream. I'm back. I'm home." I shook my head.
"No, you're not. Not really. You're a dream, reflecting what I wish, what I feel. You're my subconscious comforting my soul." She gave me an amused, skeptical look.
"When did you become cynical, my baby? Where is my imaginative daughter who always had her nose in a book?" Her tone was light, but cut deep. I never spent as much time with her when she was alive. I was always reading or something else. She must have sensed my remorse, because she shifted closer and murmured, "Cheer up, baby girl."
Those last words brought me to tears. That's what she used to call me... I started towards the phantom, wanting to feel the comfort of my mother, a comfort long lost to me. I was suddenly nestled in her arms as she held me, the feeling of her love washing over me, sending warmth through me.
"I'm so sorry," I mewled as I clung to her, a sob ripping through me. She rubbed my back in slow circles, reassuring.
"For what, sweetheart?" I sniffled once, pulling back to meet her eyes. I saw warmth and love and life in the depths of her chocolate gaze.
"I'm sorry for never spending as much time with you when I had the chance." She smiled at me.
"Do you still believe I'm not here?"
"Of course. This is a dream, albeit a vivid one." She laughed again, stroking my cheek gently.
"You've always had such a large vocabulary, and I suspect it's grown considering you're a finishing up high school now." I felt my brows draw in confusion. I step away from my mother's spirit.
"How do you know that? You never know those kind of things unless I tell you. You hardly even speak in my dreams, yet we've had a whole conversation... You're not real." I denied her claim that she was real, that this is reality, yet my voice wavered with uncertainty as I take in the guarded and slightly guilty look on her face. I pull away from her. "Are you real?"
She sighed, gathering her arms closer to her, creating a flimsy shield between us.
"I sent you a text the night I left. I shouldn't have, but I did. I wish I didn't have to go, but things would have been so bad if I didn't." I was stunned. My mother left purposely? Everything was still for what seemed like an endless moment, and then I saw red.
Anger.
"You're real? You left us intentionally? You let us think you died?" I was apoplectic, and an anger that I have kept locked away for three years surged forward as I advanced on my mother, who sensibly backed away from me.
"We cried for you, mourned for you. Where were you this whole time? Don't you know how much I needed you? How much I still need you?"
I'd felt robbed. When she had 'died', I felt as though my future had been ripped away from me. I mourned that future. I'd thought that I'd never have my mom with me on my wedding day, or at the birth of my children. She wouldn't be there for my prom, for either of my graduations, for my birthdays... For all the things I'd wanted to share with her.
No. She couldn't be real. The mirage in front of me was nothing but a seraph, sent from Heaven to... To do something. But this is a dream, because my mother would never leave her children. And that thought stopped me. Because what I confessed-- that I still need her-- is true. I'll never stop needing my mother. I went up to her, and I hugged her.
"I forgive you."
"For what?" She asked, mystified.
"For dying." She opened her mouth to protest, but I smile gently and cut her off. After we hold each other for what seemed like an indefinite moment, I look up at her and ask,
"But why did you have to go?" I sounded naive, and just as vulnerable as I always feel, but she smiled gently and patiently and with all of her love for me.
"It was my time to go and be with God." She said it so surely.
Bargain. Ask her to come home.
"Can't you come back? For just a day? I would do anything to have you back for just a while, for even just a car ride. God knows I'd give anything to just sit by you and drive, even if it is just down the street... I miss you." She smiled sadly at me.
"No, baby girl, I can't come back to you."
"Can't you come home?" Her eyes sparkled with a peace far beyond any I've known.
"I am home." And then I began to cry.
Despair.
My sobs echoed through the dreamscape, which had now shifted into a brilliant white expanse. My mother was beside me, a familiar comfort who had never seemed farther away. She hugged me while I cried, and sobbed, and screamed my grief into the echoing white. Dark thoughts flickered through my mind, taking the form of dark shadows behind my eyelids. I felt myself drown in my grief, and the dreamscape shifted once again. It was pitch dark, and I was alone. There was no light of the future, no sign of possibility. Grief weighed me down, threatening to drown me in the waters of the Cocytus— like every other despaired soul. I felt this kind of grief many times before, the kind of grief that made me want to give up on myself.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I turned to find my mother. She was bathed in white, standing in it's vast expanse while I still stood shrouded in the darkness behind me. She gently, but firmly pulled me from the darkness, just as every thought of her and what she'd want for me, has before. When we both stood in the light, she released me.
"Are you... Are you happy?" Her eyes met mine as I voiced my question. What I saw there spoke louder, and held more meaning, than anything she could possibly say to me.
Acceptance.
She's at peace. She is home.