The strongest reaction

A petite woman, with a pale face and a caramel-coloured shawl wrapped around her light blue nursing shirt, smoothed the top page of a small stack of paper before handing it to a young woman in a military-style outfit sitting next to her.

The young woman took the stack with both hands and sprang from her chair with a vigour that pushed the chair several feet backwards. She was as eager as she had been when she first introduced herself to a group of suicide survivors selected and assembled into group therapy. She smiled as I took a single sheet of paper from her hand. The opening line confirmed what I suspected – another writing exercise meant to assist the healing process. This time the task was to write about our strongest reaction.

They wanted the strongest reaction. Something real. Visceral. As real as death. What could be more real?

Maybe a birth. The day you, my beloved daughter, were born. A midwife with a stern face and fondness for calling me lass took you out of me, then placed you on my chest. All slimy and glossy. The umbilical cord still between us. She asked your father to cut the cord. He did not expect it. Neither did I. But he did as asked and, to cover his fears, told the midwife to make sure your belly button looked nice. She pursed her lips and said she had been doing it for thirty years. It was the membrane. The invisible membrane between your father and the world. Thickened by the unfamiliar language and its land.

Or maybe it was the strawberry patch day. When I told my grandmother that your father and I were leaving Croatia for New Zealand. She was tending a strawberry patch behind the house I grew up in. Parting strawberry leaves, searching for those that blushed first. Their shyness nestled in the palm of her hand. Offering them to me. To you. Inside me. She responded with that long da? (really?) she retreated into whenever something was so odd as to be disbelieving.

Or maybe it was the day of brilliant light we walked into at Auckland airport. There was so much light everywhere to make you want to close your eyes. Close them to the wide-open sky colour of aquarelle. To the shimmering ocean and army of masts bobbing in the harbour. Wide empty roads, houses with loans, and small dogs and men with earmuffs pushing lawnmowers. Up and down, up and down the green thickness.

Or maybe it was the day I listened to you reading your speech at the school speech competition in your blue and red uniform. Laughing and making others laugh. Your eleven years already aware that humour is when you laugh at everything, regardless.

Or maybe it was the day the policeman came. I watched him crossing the road, the glass panels gliding to let him in, his eyes looking inside me. I listened to the words he said. His hands on his knees. Palms down. Waiting. He watched me wail, howl, tear, scream. He watched. I called your name. He watched. A woman asked to be let in. He had closed the door. Locked. Nothing could escape.

Or maybe it was the day I brought your sunshine dress to the funeral home. The one we bought for your graduation. A gown of the future. The day I kissed you for the last time. The dimples, the eyes, the hair, the wounds. Cold.

Or maybe it was the night you came to tell me not to pay attention to that message because you wrote it in anger. I did not know you wrote it. I did not know it would never be found. You did. You always knew what I did not.

Or maybe it was the day a man with a birdlike face in the black robes of a coroner sitting high on his bench asked me to explain why I wrote a letter to the young man you asked to help you. Over and over. It made him upset, the birdlike man said. Because he didn't think you meant it. You did. The upset man sat behind me, flanked by his family. I stood in front of the birdman alone. Willing tears into missiles.

Maybe it was that day. I don't really know. The doctors have prescribed oblivion.