Pear Blossoms

It is spring in the place where I live.  The trees are, once again, showing signs of life, and several of those that flower are in full bloom.  I am always acutely aware of all the life, in all of its forms, that surrounds me, yet there is one particular type of tree to which I pay a great deal of attention, especially in years like these, when its blossoms seem particularly abundant.

The same kind of tree grew in the backyard of the house in which I lived for most of my childhood, and it featured prominently in my early years.  Once I figured out how to climb it, I would spend hours alone at the very top, watching the world, wondering what life was like for the people who lived in the other houses I could see, and surveying the undeveloped foothills of the mountains in the distance, considering their potential as a place of refuge, because they were empty, and I thought no one would be able to find me there.

Over the years, as I grew taller, it became more difficult for me to fit into the spaces between branches and consequently, I spent less time in the tree.  For a while, I lingered near it unable to move away.  I often sat with my back against its trunk staring into nothingness, but as the demands of school, sports, and life as an adolescent increased, my time with the tree decreased. 

Still, on the nights I slept in my bed, I would look out my bedroom window gazing at the tree, watching the stars through its leaves, and feeling a sense of connection to something else alive before falling asleep.  The predictable pattern of the growth of leaves and blossoms became a source of, at the very least, consistency, and although I may not have identified it as such at the time, comfort, in addition to providing what I think was a sense of hope for the future.  Until I got pregnant, the tree was the living being to which I felt most connected, and ultimately, it was the one to which I returned when my connection to Jake, and his life, was severed.   

The night, or more accurately, the morning, he died, I was taken back inside the house in which I had been staying, showered off, put into bed, and was then given something that made me sleep.  The next clear memory I have is of the sound of fireworks for the New Year’s celebration which means around four days passed between his death and the time I start remembering some things again.    

Though the lack of recollections from those days remains unsettling, perhaps it is ultimately a blessing, because when I woke, though I knew what had happened, and my body certainly indicated I had given birth, there was a significant amount of emotional detachment from the events.  The memories took on the surreal attribute of things you know happened but are of such great magnitude they cannot be placed in any kind of understanding of the world.  They became the types of memories that persist without a place to rest and without words that allow them to crystalize, so they wander through space and time, nebulous, ever-present, and always just beyond grasp.

When the winter break ended, I went back to school just like everyone else, and for the first month or so, I functioned relatively normally, although I started to struggle more than usual with food. I had always been sensitive, had always experienced problems with certain types, and had always been prone to health issues in that area, yet all this worsened dramatically within the month.  I threw up a lot, sometimes intentionally because of how awful I felt after eating and I was trying to find a way to feel better, or at least not as bad, but most of the time there was no plan to it—most of the time it just happened.

As I grew increasingly ill in the subsequent months, my mother moved my bedroom downstairs, away from the rest of the family.  The sound of me vomiting at night was interfering with their sleep and they didn’t want to be disturbed.  I was also starting to look as bad as I was feeling—my skin took on a sallow quality, my hair fell out in clumps, and I was frequently bruised and bleeding, unable to heal normally from even small bumps and scrapes.   She said that in addition to not wanting her sleep interrupted by the sound of me being sick, she did not want to have to see me because I was so disgusting to look at.

My mental health worsened at about the same pace as my physical health did that year—for about the first month, I functioned relatively normally, yet once the initial shock wore off, the state of my psyche declined rapidly.  I had managed to keep my head above water in all the previous years, despite how bad some of them had been, but this proved too much for me to handle. The intensity of the loss and the enormity of evil I had witnessed combined with the fact that I was wholly alone with both pushed me into depths of pain I had never before experienced, and until that point in time, had not known existed. 

As both my mental and physical state deteriorated, despite being ever exhausted, I struggled to sleep.  Most days I fell asleep around midnight, woke up around four, and could not find a way back to that desperately needed state of unawareness until the arrival of the next midnight.  Those hours between waking and before dawn were the worst, filled with the most agonizing pain I have yet to experience. I will never know how it is that someone can be entirely hollow and entirely filled with anguish simultaneously.  Yet this is what the experience of the death of a child is—it is being given everything but being left with nothing, it is existing in a place that is both totally black and totally white, it is the requirement that you balance matter and antimatter in the palm of your hand.  And it is completely, totally, utterly, maddening.

In an attempt to distract myself from these things and make it to sunrise each day, I started taking walks through the neighborhood.  Every morning, for about a year, the sound of my footsteps echoed through the empty streets as everyone else slept.  At first, they were random, but eventually, I established a routine, and my well-worn route became a way to block out at least some of the suffering.  The rigidness with which I executed this activity began to create a container for some of the grief.

By the following January, which was a little over a year after he died, I became too sick to do even this, and my world, already fairly quiet and isolated, became even more so.  I was sick enough that I started missing class more frequently and spent more and more time in bed.  On the days I did make it out of the house for school, by the end, I was exhausted from the physical exertion required just to carry my backpack around all day, as well as the mental exertion needed to navigate even simple social situations. Though I started to sleep a little more than I had most nights in the previous year, I still woke around four each day.  Now though, my solitary walks through the neighborhood were out of the question and I had to find a different way to handle the pain of the early mornings. One morning, while lying awake, I thought back to the times when I had not hurt so much, and in all of the memories, the tree was there. 

My new bedroom lacked the view my old one had. Before my room was moved, I could just lie in bed and look at it, but now I had to get up and go outside if I wanted to see it.  Though this trip did require what was at the time a great deal of effort, most days I could still manage the walk from my bedroom to the backyard and I began spending my pre-dawn hours under the tree, trying to maintain some kind of connection to life even as I grew increasingly close to death.

Shortly after I woke each morning, I would rise, put on extra clothes to combat the intensity of the cold I felt all the time, and then slowly make my way from my room to the sliding glass door that separated the living room from the backyard.  I would open it carefully, and close it even more carefully, stopping right before it latched, because it would be too hard to fully open a second time in a single morning.  From there, I would make my way to the tree, my hand sliding down its rough bark as I sank to the ground, and waited there for the sun to rise before going back inside to get ready for whatever I could manage in the approaching day.

Had anyone else been around during those times they would have seen a pale, grief-stricken girl, lying in the grass beneath a tree, leaves caught in what was left of her long blonde hair, her head resting on an outstretched arm that held the trunk of a tree with the fingers of the other dug into the ground, as if she were grasping at something, because even though it had been over a year before and over a thousand miles away, the soil was the place she last saw the remnants of the life that had been stolen from her.  The blossoms were particularly abundant that year, and on mornings the wind blew they fell, drifting softly, but steadily, to the ground as if they were the tears of her tree weeping for her while she choked back sobs and remained silent.  

I have been thinking about this girl a lot since October, and although I have no words of consolation for her because I know that there are none, I do wish I could tell her that far in the future, when her hair has grown back and deepened into the rich shades of an adult rather than the light one of a child, when her skin has lost the pallor of death, and when her cuts and bruises heal easily, there will come a day, in a year when the pear blossoms seem particularly abundant, when she will no longer be silent, and she will no longer be alone.