letters, elephants, and heartbeats

"What is grief, if not love persevering?" - Vision, from WandaVision

Today is a hard day.

I stand in front of the door, brushing my hand on the small elephant patch glued to the center.

Tentatively, I reach for the doorknob, terrified to open it. Scared of all of the memories and emotions that will come out of this time capsule of a room after being sealed up for over a year.

But I have to, because I made myself a promise.

I would never turn into my mother.

Mom, she was a bare minimum kind of mother. Made sure I was fed, clothed, healthy, educated. And according to pictures and home videos, she was even more - a bright light that made everyone around her happy. Then, when I was five years old, a drunk driver blew past a red light, instantly killing my father and snuffing out my mother's light.

Since then, she's been trapped in her grief, more phantom then human.

Kind of where I've been for the past year.

I can feel the tension choking me as I finally open the door, and let the wave of, well, everything crash into me. Through my teary vision, I start picking out all the elephants in the room, from the whimsical pictures hanging on lavender walls, to the big plushie on the bed and miniature statues sitting on bookshelves. And that's not even all of them.

God, she loved elephants so much.

I pick up the small stuffed one sitting on the white desk and press on its belly. A recorded male voice fills the room.

"Hi sweet girl, this is your dad. I can't wait to meet you. To be honest, this is me trying to get a head start into making sure your first word is dada."

My husband's guffaw follows, and my sad chuckle joins his.

"But really, I want you to know I'm always thinking of you and I love you so much."

Tears roll down my face as I play the bittersweet recording again.

Sasha was the first love of my life, showing me the way love should work, that grief was merely a facet of love, not the whole of it. I saw forever with him until in eerie fashion, another drunk driver cut forever short, and almost made me break my promise.

Mira, our toddler at the time and second love of my life, was my only saving grace. She soften the anguish of losing my husband, and in some sense, my father all over again.

A decorative box on the bedside table catches my attention and a small smile dances on my lips.

I have only a few hazy memories of my father, one of which is him sitting at a desk, writing away. Later, per his instructions to Mom, I was given a box, stuffed full of letters. Each was marked with a specific time to open each one - my first crush, when I started high school, you get the picture. I don't know what made Dad spend so much time writing letters to me as if he knew he wasn't going to be in my life for very long. Mom, down to this day, claims she doesn't know either. I just learned to be thankful he did, because those letters got me through so much.

So when Sasha and I found out I was pregnant with Mira, it felt right to continue the tradition. It wasn't as if we felt one or both of us would be taken from Mira's life too soon, though I'm sure the thought crossed our mind as we wrote letter after letter.

I start flipping through them, and start sobbing when I touch the first unopen one.

Open this one on your first day of high school, something she'll never get to have.

She's gone, just like Sasha, just like Dad.

I can't be in here. It's too much.

I bolt out Mira's room, and slam the door behind me, sealing it up again. For a brief moment as I'm fleeing to my own room, I wonder how long it'll be before I open it again.

Unlike Mira's room, mine only has two elephants side by side, one bigger than the other. I hold them close to me, and for a few minutes, it feels like they are both here, thanks to the sound of their heartbeats playing, like a pleasant lullaby.

Yeah, today is a hard day.

***

did you know that elephants cry

the same way we do

holding memoriam

and burying their dead

the same way we do

though really at such a time like this

it wouldn't be something i thought about

but now that i am

the only thing i can say is

what an awful thing

for us to share

-(grief) the same way we do