Letter to a Headstone — Paula Binnel
My beloved mother,
How’s death treating you? Does he make good tea? Seventeen years with him, I can imagine his chamomile getting old fast. Father said that was your favourite. Death must be boring compared to the anguish of life. I hope it’s peaceful and fulfilling wherever you are. At the least. I’ve always imagined an infinite field of flowers with bees buzzing about and rabbits hopping through the grass. There would be deer poking out from the surrounding trees, and colourful fish swimming along the river. A place where you cannot see this messy world. I hope you found satisfaction. I hope you believe that you died for something worthy.
I don’t know what to do. With the state my dad is in, I am left with no guide for what I’m supposed to do or what dreams I should be forming. I do well in school, but when I come home, I read or watch TV, or spend hours lying in bed, digging through my grief for any desire. I have no passion. No art I want to create or great scientific problem I want to solve. No scheme to achieve world peace or spend every day in an office making money. Like a kite with its string cut off, without you, I am lost. The only thing I care about is you.
I’m failing you, mother. I was meant to live an accomplished life, one worthy of its cost, and I am failing. When I am not working, I feel guilty. When I take too long to work on something, I feel guilty. When I neglect my friends or my family, I feel guilty. I stare at the photo of you on my desk, and I work a little longer as night stretches on. When I feel the pressure build inside me, demanding release, I grab a lighter, strike the flame, and I hold it at my fingers until the skin blisters. In my head, I hear my dad’s voice. Your mother lost her life to give you this one, you better make it worth it. I feel this pain—a need to prove I deserve to live. A need to pay penance when I am not living up to my end of the bargain. You left me a debt when you died, and I fear I may never pay it off.
I like to imagine I am not writing letters to a grave or using them as some strange therapy, but that we are together. We are doing something that mothers and daughters do: baking, watching TV, knitting sweaters, or drinking chamomile tea. You would be teaching me to sew on the couch as I went on about university applications. You would hug me, telling me all would be alright. It wouldn’t matter the number of hours I worked, the goals I had, or the extracurriculars I completed, just so long as I did what made me happy. I wouldn’t have to worry about being anything other than your daughter. We would smile, and my worries and stress would vanish. I would be happy.
Few can understand the pain of missing something you never had. I see mothers and daughters all around me, and I know I have lost something. I hear how my dad cries for you, the sadness that lingers when he looks at me, the moment he can never leave. He has been stuck, mother. Incomplete. Humans and all living beings are meant to grow and change, but my dad won’t move on. He won’t grow up. He wanders through life looking for the other pieces of himself, the ones ripped away, the ones that simply fell to dust in his arms. I do not feel his grief. All I know is the absence of you.
My dad tells me you held me only once. I touched your skin, tenderly held by my mother’s loving arms, and within a second it was all over. You were holding me as you began to die, as your weakening arms fought to keep hold of me. I did not cry, not while I was with you. It was only when they tore me from your dying body that I began to scream. As they tried to stop your bleeding, my dad held the fruit of your labour, watching his greatest treasure die for a burden.
You never got to name me. I wonder what you would have picked, who I would have been. Sadly, my identity revolves around you as it always has. We share one name, one lifeline. We couldn’t both exist. It was one or the other, and fate chose me. Who knows the reason. Why curse me to a life in the shadow of a ghost? You are my greatest nemesis. I will never live up to you. I will never defeat your memory.
But I must persevere. For you, for my dad, and for myself. I won’t let your death be all that comes from my life. I will be deserving of this great gift you gave me. I will make every moment worth it. I will cherish every second of my life, knowing it came from you. I will be something great. I will be something worthy. I have to be. And I promise I will.
Until we meet for tea in that flower field,
Your daughter.
Paula Binnel is a young writer and a high school student from Ontario, Canada. She has been writing fiction for 3 years now, and has won previous local awards for her work. She has written a number of prose works and short stories, and has recently founded and runs her own online literary magazine: Honeycrisp Journal.