When the world paints its faces, we remember in silence
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Only this truth:
Your baby lived.
Your baby is loved.
Your baby is remembered.
The keeper
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It’s late afternoon, Mother’s Day 2020, my ninth Mother’s Day without Anja. We walk across campus, keeping 2 metres distance between us and other families, this strange new normal we’ve already learned to accept. The children stop to climb a tree. I stoop down. A smooth round pebble nestled in a patch of bulbous brown mushrooms has caught my eye. I pick it up, rub it clean, pocket it. A keeper.
Read MorePilgrimage
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After my son died, as the cold grip of shock receded, the magnitude of this loss began to make itself understood. Ah, this right here is the what the poets and artists of the ages have been speaking of all this time. I wanted a quest, a battle to return order to my world. Where to go now, with this unbounded and hungry grief?
Read MoreOn eternal sunshine
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We are so many different things. We are happiness, sadness, madness, brokenness. All these things make us, complete us. I wouldn't want to erase any happy memories of my life with my husband or my living son. Why would I want to erase the only memories I have of my daughter?
Read MoreWalking amongst the tombstones
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Sitting on the sand a few months ago, staring out at the raging ocean, I wondered: is this a good place to put her ashes, to scatter them in the sea I love so much? Maybe with her name engraved on a bench, overlooking the place where I scatter her? Maybe her name doesn’t belong on a tombstone.
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