My beautiful ghost

Eight years ago today, she flew. Every year at this time I feel the bittersweet kiss of Spring. Life explodes in clouds of feathers, fur and fang, and the pungent soundscapes of creatures in rut. Bulbs burst, flowers pulse, pollen wafts on warming breezes. Fledgelings wheeze, joeys scramble, young snakes eel like oil through the grass. Life puts on a show everywhere but where she should be: that scrap of life I called mine, grown from my cells, is gone. There is a hole cut out of the world, and with it a piece of my heart.

I climbed a mountain today, for her. Took myself up and up, off the path, up a sheer watercourse, scrambling over rocks and vines to the escarpment, thick heath scratching my legs to pieces, which I liked, the pain reminding me I am here, still alive to feel it. It stings even now, as I write. Good.

She would be eleven, long-limbed and lithe, titian curls cascading, or perhaps rebellious, shaved it off at a friend’s house, do you like it, mama?

I met a tiger snake on the steep forest path, we were polite to each other. I gave way, bare feet and all. It watched me with a bright eye, tongue flick-licking the taste of me from the air. Found a burrow of some creature, I hope it’s a quoll. There were wildflowers everywhere, pink and purple, her favourites. The sky was so huge I thought it would swallow me. Part of me wanted it to. She would have loved it all; snake, sky, scramble. I had to love it twice as much, for her. It wasn’t hard. Doing it without her was, though.

It was a hard climb today, steep in places, and still she would have been big enough to make it with me. Scampering ahead to explore, waiting for me to haul myself up the cliff. A couple of stretches I might have had to boost her up toothy rocks, but not many. I almost saw her a couple of times, my shadow playing tricks like she used to, hiding behind trees to jump out, surprise, did I scare you, mama?

Yes, love, you did. You can stop now. Joke’s over. Come out and let me see you.
My beautiful ghost, my one precious cub.

Eight years. What a marvel.

In the beginning, grief was bright as arterial blood, the pain so enormous there was no room for anything else, like an amputated finger, all the nerve endings howling with shocking intensity. Just grab the ragged stump and wait for the white hot wave to crest, to taper, please god, hanging on, barely, thrust utterly into the now of this breath and this one, stitching together a cloak of tears.

I almost miss it. Those early days brought me into presence in a way I had never experienced. I was inescapably here, alive, every sense acute, there was no respite from the constant fiery shock of realising she was gone, and in that I found a rhythm. Grief became the dirt under my feet, the oxygen in my lungs, the water in my mouth. Whatever I thought life would hold for me, this was not it, but all the other doors slammed closed, all at once. Sometimes life is like that. It has immutable plans and now there are no do-overs, just pain, all of it, forever branding me a wanderer, without her.

Eight years later the blood isn’t bright any more, it’s dark as ink and sluggish and has soaked into bedrock, deep as the Australian desert, its heartbeat so slow and ancient you have to press your ear to the ground and go still as a stone to catch the vibration. Ba-boom.

Long grief is old and cold as iron and ice. It’s terraformed the mud and earth of me. There’s a bone weariness in me now. Carrying my bundle of stories like firewood for a bitter winter bends my back a little. Long grief wants to make an old woman of me, and although I refuse to let it, sometimes I just want to lie down and for it to be over. Eight years is a long time to be dancing. I am a little daunted by the idea of another eight, and eight more after that.

Long grief hides. It’s so embedded, whole villages and castles and cities have been built on the bones. Children play, unaware their playground is a skeleton of some creature vast and mythical, who once roamed these hills. Their laughter an echo of hers, and sometimes I still hear her on the wind.

‘Mama, I love you this much’, her arms open so wide she topples over and laughs with her whole body, head rocking with glee, whu-whu-whu.

I miss missing her. It’s true. Part of me always will, miss her, that is, but that part isn’t in my sight most of the time. Long grief is a bit cruel like that. It’s hidden her away from me. Except for these days; her birthday midwinter, this day in spring when the jasmine sings of hospitals and dread and the clocks leap forward an hour but not hers, hers wound down and no matter how hard I listen for the lightest tick-tick all I hear is my own shadow, faithful at my heels, reminding me that for every beam of light there is its opposite, and her gift lives not in her footprints but in mine, tracking her gifts further into the world she left behind.
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So that’s all I can do today, really. Remember her as best I can and watch these grizzled bare feet carry me up a cliff to sit at the top of forever, gazing at clotted horizons and holding a ghost girl who loved life so much my heart aches with how much of it I still carry for her.