Tincture (305 hits)
Category: UberMadness! EntryRating: 0.66 on 3 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Pentameter (View user info) at 2006-11-06 11:17:44 EST
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"Oh my God, she looks like death," my friend Jamie said to me.
We were sitting in church, and I looked up from my missalette to see who she was talking about. My friend, Dana, was running down the middle aisle of the church, her skin so white it almost seemed transparent.
"Yeah, she doesn't look good," I said.
I went back pretending to pay attention to what was going on, just like I had every other Friday morning during Mass. It was a freezing winter morning, so cold that by the time Mass was over, the church didn't even have time to warm up. One by one, we genuflected in front of the altar and made our way back into the school.
When I turned the corner, I saw Dana sitting in front of the secretary's desk. I looked at her and mouthed, "You ok?"
She looked at me and shook her head, "Yes," but her facial expression told me something completely different. I walked into the office and put my arms around her and whispered, "Feel better."
For a moment, we embraced. She held onto me tightly, but didn't say a word.
That was the last time I saw her alive.
In the following days, I would replay that moment and many others that I shared with Dana over and over again. Apparently, the doctors thought she was simply dehydrated, when she was actually fighting off a massive infection. Because her immune system was already compromised due to a birth defect, the misdiagnosis proved to be fatal.
She didn't have a chance.
At the age of seventeen, I walked into a funeral home to say goodbye to my friend. To this very day, I can still see her lying in the casket. She had on a purple corduroy jumper, with a multi-colored striped turtleneck underneath. Her hair was parted to the side and clipped back, just like she had always worn it.
I looked at her mouth, the mouth that had whispered secrets into my ear about boys who she liked, the mouth that had cheered at basketball games, the mouth that concealed a gap-toothed smile that always made me feel warm inside.
The mouth that would never speak another word.
Her lips looked as though they had been clamped shut, all curled and bunched together. I could not take my eyes off of them because they looked so wrong. They were too severe, too wrong.
It was all so wrong.
I don't even think I said a word to anyone in her family. I stood there, staring at her, feeling as though an electric current was running through my body. There was a burning inside of me, an aching from the helplessness I felt in that moment. Tear after tear rolled down my face, carving tiny rivulets into my cheeks from their wearing on my skin.
I turned around and ran.
I ran out of the funeral home and out onto the sidewalk, where my feet wouldn't let me stop running. Maybe I thought that if I ran away, that I could escape the despair that I felt. Maybe I thought that if I ran away, I'd come back and she would be alive, that it would all be a mistake.
My throat was ripped to shreds from all the sobbing I had done that that day. At the funeral, it was even worse. An entire church full of people wailed over the death of this child, some of whom didn't know her the way some of us had.
Many of those people didn't teach her how to do a cartwheel. Many of those people didn't count pennies with her so that they could share an ice cream cone. They didn't write her notes and slip them in her locker. They never slept at her house, they never quieted her tears when she was broken hearted, they never shared little joys with her. They didn't do any of those things.
But I had.
Members of our class carried her casket out of the church and pushed it into the back of the hearse. In a strange way, I never wanted that moment to end. It was too final for me. As the hearse drove down the street, our entire school and the grade school that we had both attended lined the road in an honor guard. Hundreds of children wiped their eyes as the hearse became a pinpoint in the distance.
It took me five years to be able to visit her grave. My hand was wrapped so tightly around the fistful of daisies I had picked that by the time I had set them down on the ground, they were completely crushed. I collapsed on the ground and sobbed as I thought about what the coldness must have done to her body. I pictured her hair having grown past her shoulders and her fingernails being very long, something she had always wanted in life.
I thought about her mouth, how she had looked in the casket, how she had looked before she died. I wondered if she knew when I had hugged her the day she died that it was going to be the last time we'd ever see each other.
There was a picture of her they put in our yearbook. It was a picture she had taken of herself, and her smile was wide. That was the way her mouth should have looked, and no matter how hard it was for me, I would have to remember her that way.
That was the first and only time I visited her grave. It's as though my thumb is on the corner of the page of a flipbook and I'm reliving those memories in rapid succession, haunted by every recollection.
I remembered my mom telling me on the day of her funeral that all I needed was a good dose of the "Tincture of Time."
She said, "In a few years, you won't be this sad. You'll never get over it, but it won't hurt as much."
It has been ten years since she died.
Ten years.
And I'm still waiting for the medicine to take effect.
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