I just finished reading The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman. It was a quick read that began with the narrator's mother dying when the narrator was a child and her mother was exactly 30. The rest of the narrator's story is colored by this experience--a moment that changed the course of her life and forever changed her as well. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator is watching monarch butterflies migrate and she thinks, "You wouldn't think there could be so many butterflies in the world. You wouldn't think everything could change in an instant. But there are, and it does."
The holiday seasons have been bittersweet for me since I lost my own father in an instant in 2002. I still don't know exactly what happened that day. I know that he was there when I went to work and gone when I came home. What happened in between will forever be a mystery. I know firsthand how a single moment can change a life. The most dramatic of life changes occur in the small moments that refuse to be ignored. I wonder if my father knew about such change that morning when he told me to "be good" on my way out the door.
The narrator in The Ice Queen believes that she ended her mother's life with an idle and selfish childhood wish. I do not believe I wished my father's life away, but I do wish that I had loved him better and appreciated him more while he was here. The narrator wondered if her mother's last thoughts had been of her and her brother. She notes that her mother "probably didn't even consider the way we would miss her. Each and every minute of each and every day." I wonder, too, if my father would have known if he thought about it or if I was always too caught up in myself to give him any indication of how badly my heart would break if he ever left. And it is that kind of miss that I carry with me at all times--the eternally deep emptiness that comes from losing something that you didn't know was so valuable until it was gone.
Maybe if I let it, time would close my wound, but I honestly don't want to heal fully from my loss. I want to carry that pain with me because it reminds of how fragile life is, how precious each breath we take and each sunrise we see. I also want to carry the pain with me because other than pictures, it is all I have left of him. The narrator's pain and guilt froze her, my hope is that my pain has melted me some and will continue to melt me as long as I hold onto it.
Posted by Kim at December 31, 2005 04:02 PM