MUMMY

Chapter Five - Mummy

There is simply no bond that is greater than a mother with her child. If a mother doesn't feel that way, then maybe the gift of motherhood should never be hers to own?

K B Mallion

Damian....

I knew something was wrong. Something so bad and so terribly wrong, yet I did nothing.

Hanna and I had both been grieving over Heidi-May, but I thought that grief had glued us together. We both went through something so traumatising and so utterly heartbreaking, I believed it would forever hold us together.

And Hanna seemed so much better.

She oddly seemed over her grief. She was strangely happy, yet became more and more detached from me and her life.

As happy as she seemed, she began not wanting to leave the house, so I thought she was maybe planning so much more for her future...for our future.

Only, I was wrong.

So very naively wrong.

Hanna wasn't planning her future, she was planning her death.

She wanted to leave her life.

She wanted to leave me.

How could she?

Why would she do that?

Why would she do that to me?

I'm haunted by those questions. I'm haunted by the vision of her curled up on the bed, dead but at peace.

How does that even happen?

How can you be at peace when you've just taken your own life?

How can you be at peace when you're leaving everything and everyone behind?

I'm so angry with her.

Angry with myself.

My head is achingly full of what ifs and my heart is full of woeful why's.

I miss her. God, I miss her.

First my precious little Heidi-May, now my beautiful Hanna.

How much pain can one person actually take?

I thought I had already endured a lifetimes worth, but the heavens obviously disagreed. First, it took my daughter. Now, its taken my wife. Despair has diseased all that used to live in my heart.

It has rotted away my entire future.

I see no future.

I only see a dark black pit of emptiness in front of me.

Is this how Hanna felt?

Is it?

But, she was happy!

I just don't get it, she was happy!

Okay, so she started talking some really creepy crap about Heidi-May, but if I had supported that creepy crap, maybe she would still be here? If that creepy crap was making her happy, maybe I should have listened more to it?

But the creepy crap was just that...creepy.

Hanna believed that Heidi-May was back. She kept saying that our baby girl was still with us. She told me about all the weird things that had been happening to her, and all that Hanna was telling me, frankly, freaked me out.

I have never believed in all that Afterlife stuff.

I never will.

We live. We die.

That's it.

We get buried or we get cremated.

That's it.

Only, Hanna believed that there was more. She believed our baby girl was with us, that she was with her.

I should have listened.

I love Hanna, so I should have listened.

I didn't believe in all that she hopingly did, but I still should have been there for her. That's why she pulled away from me. That's why she felt like I had let her down. That's why she began sleeping in the nursery, because the rocking chair in our dead daughters room felt far better than being in our marital bed.

I let my wife down. I let my darling, yet very sick wife, down.

Sometimes, I would hear her talking to our dead daughter.

Sometimes, I would see her embracing a nothingness, like it was something so completely cherished by her...and yet, I still did nothing.

I have to live with that.

I will have to carry that until the last miserable breath leaves my devastated body. But now, I desperately need some sleep. I haven't slept in days and days. Such dark and awful days. I'm so tired. So so tired. My forehead is painfully taut with the most awful kind of tiredness stretched right across it.

So, I just need to rest my eyes.

Rest my thoughts.

Rest my body.

I listen to the quietness all around. I listen to the deafening quietness of my grief and my sorrow. The grief and the sorrow is all I now know, it's become the one and only constant in my life.

It's all I feel.

It's all I hear.

It's all that exists.

As it familiarly cocoons itself around me, I know that an unsettled kind of sleep will soon be here. And god, an unsettled sleep is as good as any sleep a grieving man like me can have. So I welcome that unsettled sleep. I welcome it with pained impatience. It will at least bring me a fragile solace to wearily rest my shattered soul in.

It's almost here.

Almost.

I can almost touch it.

As it moves hypnotically closer, like a slow-moving fog, I am so exhaustingly near to that fragile solace, that my breaths become deep and laboured. And just as the unsettled sleep descends, just as it foggily veils me, the deafening silence is fractured by a distant and tiny little whisper.

"Daddy."