Memories

 “…There's a time that I remember, when I did not know no pain
When I believed in forever, and everything would stay the same
Now my heart feel like December when somebody say your name
'Cause I can't reach out to call you, but I know I will one day, yeah…

 

…Toast to the ones here today
Toast to the ones that we lost on the way
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories
And the memories bring back, memories bring back you.”

 

--“Memories,” Maroon 5

 

Dear Thi,

For your fourth birthday in December, we came to visit you a week early. In this year, your big brother Luc entered kindergarten. In this year, your little sister Dannica weaned, potty trained, and talked more, stringing together sentence syntax like Lego blocks that fit well together in a given sequence.

 

 

The gravestones in the cemetery seem arrested in time. Some had slowly weathered with discoloration, the etchings of names and dates faded through the decades. As we drove away, we were surprised to see that the sad columbarium wall containing cremation niches for babies lost in the womb or in infanthood had gotten replaced by neat rows of white marble gravestones, each resting place now more visible to honor and remember those lost too soon. 

 

When we had to lay you to rest, we were offered a niche in the old columbarium, and we had instead opted for a prime piece of land in the Legacy Garden of Life near the water fountain. It’s here that you play by the waterside and a wrought-iron dome of interlaced flower vines, waiting for Mommy and Daddy to one day join you. As we visit the cemetery across the years, we see its gradual evolution, where flat, grassy land gets taken over by more and more gravestones. And yet, the ones that were here before whisper of older ages, a place both changing and frozen in time.

 

This was the first time I was away for your birthday. In past years, we were buffeted by grief, picking up our shattered hearts and lives after you died. Then came the years of gentle mourning and reminiscence as the pain softened, but the memories remained. This year, we took a trip to the snow with your grandparents and auntie’s family, staying in a secluded cabin atop a hill with sweeping views of snow-blanketed treetops and a panoramic window opening to red-orange sunrises. 

 

As I watched the siblings and cousins play in the snow with bliss and abandon, I wondered how different the energy would be if you had been among them.

 

 

 

I know that your spirit isn’t bound to your gravestone home sitting almost 200 miles away, but as the physical distance and passing years stretch on between us, I couldn’t help feeling like I am leaving you behind. To make you real and feel you close, to battle how time erodes memory like faded words carved into tombstones long ago, I slid open the patio door where a mound of soft snow waited outside the cabin and wrote your name in the expanse of white. 

 

After an eventful trip of climbing and sliding down the steep slope slippery with ice, we arrive back home, where spring comes softly upon us after a winter of little rain. 

 

The camelia I planted in your honor bloomed heavily, though its blossoms and leaves looked burned this year. We make plans to replenish the nutrients in the soil for a better recovery cycle next year. 

 

The succulent planter I interchange at your graveside now thrives in our backyard in the shaded protection of your father’s avocado tree, the thick cactus leaves water-gorged and evergreen. You still come to me in cotton-candy sunsets and mornings shrouded in fog and mist. 

 

I travel to places for errands, work, and relaxation, always docking back home, a cyclic purpose to my trips, and I wonder if the path you take in the afterlife is cyclic, linear, or some other pattern that in my human life I couldn’t begin to fathom. Sometimes I feel you visit, and it’s still that aching longing of seeing something so beautiful and much-wanted, something that could have been, but nothing that I could gather into my arms to hold. Sometimes my vision of how you would have looked like strikes stark and clear like lightning in that space between awakeness and dreams…but sometimes it fades like spiderweb silks adrift in a breeze. 

 

And so when I’m surrounded by nature’s beauty and bounty, in a place bigger than how far my imagination could stretch, I make myself remember by etching your name into sand and snow. Soon, the waves stretch inward to wash the sand smooth once more. Soon, a blanket of fresh snow turns the landscape a stark and pristine white. But underneath the surface, I picture that my etchings are still present, like a hidden scar of a little girl's name that still remains across the healing terrain of my heart.