The End

Daisy

What are all the things that happen in a life once the rug is ripped out from under you? They morph into something monstrous, ebbing and flowing – black ink threatening to blot you out.

Like Granny leaving three days later, us barely getting to know one another. She waited until I got the call from an out-of-state detective letting me know they’d found Carson’s body in some motel in Dayton. I instantly pictured the one from my mother’s post card, and morbidly thought how, in a way, they were together again.

Granny offered for me to come back to Fayetteville with her, but I told her I’d be fine. It was edging close to my seventeenth birthday, and then from there, I’d be eighteen and technically able to be on my own anyway.

A year later, a few days after my eighteenth, a nurse from hospice wrote me, telling me Granny had passed. It hurt even though I didn't know her well. But she was the only person left connected to my past, and she also made it a point for me to know she had gone.

A gift my own parents had never even left me.

I eventually found a boy after that, got pregnant, and the rest is history. Ha, not really because it still sits in my bones, in what remains of my gut – the rest of a life unlived.

I had Hellie, and then a year later, Brent, and I played the wife to a man who drank too much beer and fixed too many cars (talk about marrying your unfinished business), and then he went and died (car accident).

At least it wasn’t his choice.

There on out, I was a single mother, and eventually, raising a teenaged daughter who hated me (which seemed unfair considering I never even had the chance to be a teenager who hated her mother), and I know she thinks I loathed her. That I preferred her brother over her, and that's not true or fair either.

Brent was just different. He needed more help.

There's something I read once that stopped me dead in my tracks when standing in line at the food pantry while the kids were in school. It was at a church, in their fellowship hall, and on the wall was what I supposed was a Bible verse. It said, "When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, 'Do you want to be healed?'”

I thought it a bit cheeky, maybe even rude. Here I was in a place, a slice of life where I couldn't do anything about my outcome, and this wall had the nerve to ask me if I wanted to be healed?

I never went back after that. I figured I'd rather we all starve.

But now? The question is heavy within me.

Hellie has fallen asleep. She's been at my bedside, jawing at me, as is her usual mode. I hate it when she does that. But I also commend her spark. Reminds me of Granny.

I grow tired, a weakness that I know is more than exhaustion. It's the bell tolling, slight and soft and almost beautiful in my ears. But I still lift my hand and gently place it on her head.

I'll miss her and Brent, and all the things I could have done or been if I would have had the guts to answer then.

But at least I can now.

Do you want to be healed?

Yes, Lord. Yes, I do.