It didn’t take long after burying Laura that I realized I had made too many decisions in haste. One of the biggest that continues to haunt me is that I called a battered women’s shelter to pick up everything she owned. They loved getting clothes, medicines, contact lenses, make-up and all the other accouterments a woman might ever need. Most of their clients have fled an abusive situation with only the clothes on their backs. It made me feel good, for a few hours, that Laura was helping those women.
When opening a drawer at our house in the bedroom she used, I was suddenly hit with her favorite flannel p.j.’s and slippers. No matter what the season, I always keep the house too cold for Laura and she dressed for her comfort. After another huge cry, out it went. Because she was house-sitting when she died, Laura had her whole “life” in a storage unit that we cleaned out way too quickly as well, taking and discarding item after item because at that moment, I couldn’t face the reality that she was not coming back to claim it.
It was a mistake and one that gets larger as time goes on.
I can’t tell you how much I wish I had something to hold that was a part of Laura. I dream of those silly green pajama bottoms that were her nightly uniform every time she was here. I see quilts that survivors have made of their loved one’s clothes and think that is another thing I will never have. I see pictures of Laura with this weird square silver ring she always wore, and cry again because someone else is wearing it. Her friends asked for different items, and I gave them away with abandon. While I was erasing my child’s possessions, I was erasing too much of what made her special that I would give anything to have back.
The lesson is: Wait before you clean. Get a storage locker if having possessions in your home is too painful and give it, at least, six months before you look at them again. At the six month mark, I cried anew at what I didn’t have to hold other than my memories. That continues to this day.
Another big mistake could happen to anyone when faced with a crisis of burying their child. Where do you want her to be for eternity? We chose to put Laura in a vacant space owned by our family that was adjacent to my grandparents. Laura had known and loved Nannie and Pappa and, even though they were her great-grandparents, she spent many happy days and nights with them. It seemed like a logical choice. Better still, it was a choice we didn’t have to make because it was just presented to us and we didn’t have to traipse all over the cemetery looking at vacant plots. Win-Win we thought.
Sitting under the awning with our wonderful minister saying the final prayers over her casket it hit me and I wanted to stand up and shout! I knew suddenly then without question that I wanted Laura to be beside me throughout eternity, and not over next to my grandparents, no matter how beloved, who would probably never get a visitor after I was gone.
The reality now that in order to make this happen I will have to move Laura. There were so many other choices I could have made. Among them are cremation and having her urn buried with us, or choosing a larger family space instead of the two we owned, whatever it would have taken. As horrible as it is to even consider, some parents do have to bury their child. It’s worth a thought before you’re ever faced with having to make a decision when you are too fragile to think clearly.
Someday I will figure this all out and decide what, if anything, to do. Until then, she rests with her great-grandparents who loved her and were an active part of her life. I can get some peace with knowing that.
Life Without Laura 