Live, Laugh, Love

After it happened, I expected the world to stop turning. I expected the sky to go dark, the moon to crash into the earth, the birds to go silent, the wind to no longer blow through the trees.

I expected it, because that's what should have happened. If the very earth that created her had any level of care or reverence for my mother, it should have shown something. It should have gone dark. The sun should have been swallowed up by the sheer darkness that was my world after she was gone.

She was my rock, and I was just the layer of soil and grass atop the cliff. Without her, it was all falling away beneath my feet, sinking down into the endless oceanic abyss below.

“I want you to live, and laugh, and love,” she had said to me the day before she died.

“Did you just tell me, on your death bed, to live, laugh, love, like one of those cheesy signs you put up around the house?” I’d replied, and she’d laughed as best as she could, then coughed up another puddle of what looked for all the world like coffee grounds, straight from her lungs.

After it happened, the nurse told me, with as much kindness one could manage when telling a dead mother’s teenage daughter, “I’m sorry, we need to move her soon.”

At that moment, I saw the sunlight stream through the window, and it felt like a betrayal. Like the warm, golden glow was mocking me, mocking her, as her body laid there in a hospice bed with no life left in it.

How could the sun keep shining? How could the world keep going, so apathetic to the intense weight of my grief? How, when I was staring down the rest of my life without my mother, could the sun still feel warm against my skin, ask me to step outside and bask in it, as if nothing had changed? As if the world—my world—hadn’t just crumbled in on itself?

Pulling myself away from her, I knew it was time. I knew had to go, and that the minute I stepped away, it would be the last time I ever saw her. All I would have left after that was a memory.

Before I stepped out of the front door of the hospice, a nurse handed me a leaflet for their grief counselling service, and when I looked up at her face, I saw what my mum and I had been calling the Funeral Face since the moment the doctor told us it was incurable. It’s that kind of dismayed, heartbroken cloud looming across someone’s face, accompanied by a crease on their forehead, and what is probably meant to be a relatable—and therefore comforting, somehow—downturn of their mouth.

I understood it—people didn’t know what to do or say, or what facial expression was appropriate. But the fact that there was no difference between the looks people gave us back when she was still living and breathing, and the look the hospice nurse gave me right after my mother had died, sent a shiver down my spine.

Frozen in my spot, feeling like frost was starting to fuse together all my veins, I looked down at the leaflet. On the front, there was a silhouette of a person, looking out at a field full of daisies. In the sky beyond, casting the person into just an outline, the sun shined.

“I’m really sorry for your loss,” a different nurse told me as I clutched the leaflet in my shaking hand. “She was a very special lady.”

“Thank you,” I managed. We can help you after the loss of a loved one, the cover read, in a friendly, non-threatening font at the bottom of the page. I almost laughed. Mirthless though it would have been, I felt it anyway, trying to bubble up through the quickly-forming sheet of ice in my chest.

“We are still here for you, even now she’s gone, and will be for as long as you need us. Even if you don’t want to talk now, and it’s in ten years’ time, we will be there.” The second nurse squeezed my arm and gave me the Funeral Smile (the sister expression to the Funeral Face; very similar, but with an upward turn of the mouth instead of down, a sort of sympathetic smile that was, as far as I could tell, uniquely given to people with terminal cancer and their family members.)

The hospice’s front door opened heavily, seeming almost as reluctant as I was. When I stepped outside, the sun immediately assaulted my vision, glinting brightly across the tops of the surrounding trees. Blinking at me, unrelenting, uncaring. The world had just changed forever, a piece of my soul was just ripped from me, but everything out in the car park looked exactly the same as it had when she was still alive.

Just as the sun shined, the world carried on.

I knew, in that moment, that I could not.

***

The grief counselling leaflet sat on my kitchen table for months.

Eventually, it got buried beneath letters, delivery boxes, magazines, and any other items that technically had a purpose, but only really served to remind me of how time was still moving, despite the fact I wished more than anything it wouldn’t.

Six months after my mum died, I watched Captain America: The First Avenger, at the end of which, Captain America is found frozen in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

“Oh, my God, this guy’s still alive!” the man on the screen exclaimed as the translucent cocoon of ice began to defrost, a flash of red, white, and blue showing through.

There it was again, that humourless laugh wanting to push its way past my gloom.

That’s what it feels like, I thought, wry. I’m alive, but I’m frozen. And everyone around me is still moving.

Despite the aching sting in my extremities, and despite the fact that, unlike Captain America, I was not a super human who could survive becoming an iceberg, I wanted to be frozen. To be still. To not move any further away from the time when my mum was alive.

I watched, as Captain America woke up in a room in the future, seventy years after being lost to the sea; I watched, knowing it was supposed to be exciting and hopeful when this beloved superhero turned out to still be alive, and was about to enter the modern world.

But all I could think about—and apparently, what no one in the movie was thinking about when they dragged him out of his blissful state of unawareness—was his grief. All the people that were gone, all the places that were gone, and I thought, You should have let him stay frozen.

I couldn’t watch another Marvel movie with Captain America in it again.

***

A year to the day after it happened, it rained.

Finally, I thought, The Earth has agreed that this emptiness inside me is worthy of at least a little display of the darkness.

***

“Maybe sitting out in the sun would be a good idea,” my father suggested one midsummer’s evening, when the sun was a little less relentless in its intense heat, but still strong enough to warm your skin. “It would be good for you. Your mum used to love sitting out in the garden when the weather was like this.”

“The garden has gone to shit since she died,” I answered from my place in bed with both curtains closed over the window. “I don’t want to be reminded of how it used to be.”

He had sighed, but not argued. Instead, he walked over to my window and slowly pulled open one of the curtains. The second curtain left me in the shade, while the sun shot through the other half of my room, a golden glow cutting across the bed in front of me.

“At least let the sun remind you of her,” he’d said softly. “You don’t have to be in it. But it’s there. I want you to see it. She would want you to see it.”

As he walked away, I grimaced, but I didn’t close the curtain again. Instead, I watched the light for hours, until the honeyed yellow beams turned into darker shades of orange, encompassed by a blue-pink aura settling across my whole room.

Beneath my anger, beneath the sour twinge of grief on my tongue, a new feeling started to take shape.

My mum loved a beautiful sunset, always said it was God putting on a show. I wasn’t sure if I believed that anymore, having witnessed the cruel reality of an illness that did not come from human free will, and could so easily be stopped by the hand of an all-powerful, all-loving God. But I knew that, despite all that, my mother still did believe it, until her last breath. And maybe it wouldn’t hurt, to see it as she did, just this once.

In the hallway, heading towards the kitchen, the air felt lighter than it had for a while. I didn’t wish it was raining. And when I passed the painted white wooden sign above the kitchen door, Live, Laugh, Love scrawled across it in a cheesy, Pinterest-esque font, there it was in my chest: the bubbling laughter.

This time, it just made it through the ice, like tiny bubbles through the surface of the Arctic sheets.

***

I don’t know exactly when the feeling of sunlight entirely stopped feeling like an act of apathy from the universe. I don't really know when the gaping hole my mum left became so much a part of me that wildflowers began to seed around it, growing up tall and beautiful, all the flowers my mother loved.

But I do know when I realise what all this grief is. Where that hole comes from, and why the flowers chose it as a place to grow their roots.

It’s now, as I step out into the sunlight on a chilly autumn morning.

At last, it makes sense. The cold-hearted existence of grief within a world that will always continue on, relentless in its pursuit to keep turning; the rising of the sun day after day, even when everything gets plunged into darkness. It all has a name.

Love.

As the gentle warmth dances across my skin, I am no longer reminded of the pain, of the ruthlessness with which she was taken away from me. It doesn’t feel like I’m wrapped in a cocoon of ice, being pulled out of it against my will by a universe who hasn’t even considered that I might not want it.

Instead, the light feels like my mother, like her smile shining down on me, like she’s enveloping me in her arms and thawing out the icy cold inside me that's been there since she faded away. The world continuing on without her is no longer a betrayal, a mockery. It honours her. The beauty of dew on the grass early in the morning, the spin of a spider as it creates its web, the swaying of the trees in the breeze.

It’s her.

It’s all her.

And now, just like the sun, nothing can ever take that away.

So I step out into the golden beams, and I let her warmth sink into my bones.