that night

7:00 AM – At school, everything was off. No one knew what I went through last night but at the same time I knew they all knew something. I never wore my heart on my sleeve but after God ripped it out of my chest I don’t know where else to put it. Six feet under might work. There’ll be enough room in the casket; cancer took most of her before she died. I hope she’ll get more use out of it than I ever did. At least then she’ll go to heaven with a heart; cancer took that from her too.

5:00 AM - Everything was still. All the wailing and pain left in the body bag with her leaving us all numb and empty. A house of four bloodlines emptied within two hours. Greif can be genocidal.

3:00 AM – When the paramedics arrived, it was chaos; between the crying and screaming no one told them where her body was so they weaved through fresh anguish and a field of medical equipment before finding a corpse tied to false promises. The first thing they did was unplug her oxygen machine like she wasn’t already dead for 50 minutes. I thought her flatlining was going to be the noise that stuck with me, but it was the silence after all the machines were turned off. They’ve been at home for nearly a month, and I became so familiar with their buzzing that when it stopped, I felt like a part of me died too.

1:00 AM – Her last words: "Where's the baby?" I was asleep and unaware. A child forever in her memory - no wonder she didn't want to hug me.

11:00 PM - Death only arrived today but its smell has been festering for weeks. Like a shirt worn for ten days in a row, each morning the smell of fresh daisies and blue skies fades slightly and is replaced with the musk of your blood, sweat, and tears. Eventually, that’s all the shirt smells like and you don’t even notice until it hits you right in the nose. But everyone else knew - you stink. Just like we all knew the daisies are dying and so is she.

9:00 PM – I miss her. She’s not even gone yet, and I miss her. My mom said she’s been gone ever since she got diagnosed but I still knew she was there. The way she always wanted someone to hold her hand, how she needed music in the background to calm down, how she’d yell and scream when you did something wrong. No matter how weak the chemo made her she always found the strength to hit you for messing up. At least cancer let her keep something.

7:00 PM – It didn’t fully hit me until now. She’s dying. After today I’ll never see her again. I’ll never hear her laugh or look at her smile. We’ll never make cookies or paint outside. I don’t remember the last time we did either of those. I wish I knew it was the last time before it ended. I would have tried harder to remember it if I knew. All I remember is her cancer. Spreading through each memory of her, one by one, not stopping until I forget her. She’s the one with cancer, but I’m the one who has to live with it.