When a tear falls
Chapter 1
The tear in the Sky
The day Lightning tore through a clear blue sky changed everything.
It was difficult to believe; even as it happened. The sky folded back, opening up right in front of me. For a moment the park was bathed in the most brilliant otherworldly shimmering light.
And then it ripped me out of my life.
My body ached with weariness.
I was tired. It had been a long day, gently rummaging through the remains of ruined lives. Sad parents left painfully marooned for so many hard and lonely years. Working with blameless people out of their depth, drowning in guilt could be uplifting, but for the most part it was exhausting.
Many of these heroically numbed parents sleepwalk, through excruciating grief stricken lives. I am awed by their strength. Ordinary people forced to fend for themselves, abandoned by a careless world. Like most I believe if it was me I wouldn’t cope. Maybe wouldn’t even want to. Most remain too depressed by grief to question the unfairness of it all: Crushed by the weight of loss. Dreams of a perfect child and a golden parenthood rudely despatched. Afraid of failure, many swallow back the bitter taste of resentment and leave the unspoken ‘…why me?’ forever frozen on pinched lips. Sometimes, after a lifetime of quiet desperation:
The English way:
And a referral process only marginally more effective than the toss of a coin, they find their way to a specialist service. Before being completely rolled flat they might even be referred to me. Although not fully conscious of it, too deeply buried, way down, where all the forgotten bodies are, the nightmare they’re too afraid to remember waits. I walk around the never spoken and gently push words out, waiting as they roll around.
A penny waiting to drop:
And what lies hidden tumbles awkwardly into the waking world. The question that opens the can and exposes the worm is a hard thing to say, even harder to hear. ‘….what was the first thing that went through your mind when you were first told your baby was damaged?’
The beans are spilt.
My mind still reeled with the latent power in the words reluctantly scraped out from between the gritted teeth of Sally my last client of the day. ‘Nobody has ever really cared about how I feel.’ Although a slender stick of a woman, and still attractive in a nostalgic kind of way with wispy ash coloured hair that didn’t seem to care too much about itself, she was old before her time. She wept as she spoke. ‘I take Jenna to every clinic and they test her over and over again…what for? She doesn’t get any better, her sight is worse and she can’t tell them how she feels.’ For the most part Sally averts her gaze. Behind tiny rimless glasses watery grey eyes dance and dart, they pause; but only for a moment before moving on nervously. I get the impression she is afraid to linger lest she leave herself vulnerable to attack.
Sally reminds me of a nervous bird, a little robin, guarded and easily spooked. With what I was certain took enormous effort she looked straight at me, tears streaming down her crumpled face. The room silent and expectant: A lone house fly drove blindly against the partially opened window.
There is an easy way out. But he doesn’t find it.
I exhaled slowly and waited. Concentration always brief, easily infiltrated by the everyday. The sound of a street cleaning truck slowly rolling past the window: the angry incessant beeping of a car alarm and the muffled voice of a colleague speaking too loudly on a telephone in the next room. My God but I mustn’t get sleepy.
