The Grieving
Published on Reflex Fiction Jan 2021
I wept under her purple sheets. Neighbours left soup on our doorstep, but never knocked. My husband drank Vodka till he passed out and couldn’t see me. He was raging, I was crying. I was guilting, he was denying. The revolving door of grief.
I followed my sorrow to the youth centre. On a wall crowned with barbed wire, my daughter had painted PEACE OUT and a dove. I kissed the cold brick feathers of her bird. At the supermarket, I overfilled my basket with Jaffa cakes and ate them as she used to, pulling out the orange glob.
Friends chatted about everything, but avoided any mention of my daughter. Others crossed streets to avoid me – mice, scuttling from a cat. But Corinne dashed over the zebra to greet me, asked how I was and if we could talk about Sharee.
‘I remember when Sharee dyed everything purple, including her shoelaces,’ she said.
‘And our dog’s tail, remember?’ I replied.
I held Corinne, vice-like. Grieving in, grieving out.
She had a donkey-grey coat and pilling pink bobble hat. I followed her to the art space she was setting up in the church hall, swept out ghosts of prayers and boy scouts, chased spider colonies from cupboards.
Classes began. I helped: mixing paint, making tea. In breaks I ached in the churchyard, pressed my spine into trees – great-grandmother trees wearing faces of time, branches bending open-armed, hosting magpies and crows. My sorrow twined around their roots.
Corinne gave me paper and a palette and suggested I paint the trees. I slashed sharp lines of trunks and stick people; just bones but empty inside.
Months slogged by, I worked on a painting of Sharee cradled under a tree canopy of creamy blossoms, dotted purple plums and blackberries on their labyrinth of boughs. My bird in her tree-home joined the gallery of stories on the walls. I talked about Sharee in paint and pencil, charcoal and ink. As the art space grew, I helped people paint out their pain in dark watercolours, muted shades and squares of bright.
Mixing paint, making tea, I followed my sorrow to a shard of meaning.