Family Grief

Her mother killed herself by overdosing on a mix of citalopram and rizatripan. 

They weren’t close.

She looked down at waves, battering and screaming at the cliffs one hundred metres below. 

Her grandmother hung herself from the tree she planted in her backyard when she was a child. 

Her grandmother told her every secret she knew, even the dangerous ones.

She wasn’t scared. The waves were so far down below and she wasn’t scared.

Her great-grandmother jumped in front of a train. 

She wasn’t a very good mother, from what she’d heard. 

It was cold, and raining, and the rain hurt, and it made her cold and wet. 

Her great-great grandmother also hung herself in her husband's bedroom. 

It had taken her ages to find anything about her great-great-grandmother. 

The wind was strong, loud in her ears. It sounded like laughter.

Her mother’s name was Mary. That name was absent for most of her childhood, since Mary was prone to disappearing and leaving her daughter alone on a whim.

Mary had promised she wouldn’t leave her, the day before she left forever. 

Her hair covered her face like a mask, but she still tried to gauge the time it would take for her to fall. 

Her grandmother's name was Edith. To be honest, she thought Edith’s thoughts had just become too much for her to handle any longer. 

She also thought she was too young to have to hear all the secrets Edith told her. 

She was all alone- it had taken her thirty-four minutes to drive here, contemplating whether to just drive off the cliff instead, and then a thirteen minute walk to the cliff edge. 

Her great grandmother was called Joanne. Scared of the responsibility of motherhood, Joanne hated Edith, or so she had been told. 

To her Joanne had simply been one of the many secrets Edith whispered to her, wide-eyed in the middle of the night. 

She was another secret that would disappear in the middle of the night. Would her son think about her like this, when his time inevitably came? 

Her great-great grandmother, Penny. She lived a fine life back then, with a well-to-do husband.

She had found Penny’s existence in the back of a box, forgotten, dusty, and faded. 

The rain had reached her bones now- she felt brittle and fragile, each droplet breaking the skin of her body. 

Mary never married. Mary was in countless relationships, but she had never had a father. She spent her childhood with Edith, and those little secret whispers.

She was on the edge, so close, why hadn’t she done it? She felt she should let herself sought out some of her thoughts before she went. Then she could go easier.

Most of the secrets were told when her grandfather wasn’t around. His presence was always heavy, often followed by banging and shouts more often than not. All she could do was keep Edith’s secrets close to her when he did. 

The cliff was moving beneath her. Her stomach matched the sea, roiling and brawling, angry. 

Joanne had spent her whole life in her own invisible corner of anger. When Edith arrived, all she saw was a disgusting extension of herself. 

One of Edith’s most frightening secrets was the fact Joanne was her mothers sister and daughter. 

A few generations down the line, was she just as disgusting? Was her son? She wanted to be clean. 

Once Edith told her Joanne’s secret, she understood Penny a lot more when she found her. She found she couldn’t blame Penny for all she’d started, and had kept those few delicate clippings close. 

She wanted to go home. 

Using her hands, she inched just a little closer to the edge. The ground beneath her sifted and slid out beneath her slightly, causing her to freeze in terror. Her gasp was quickly swallowed by the wind. She squeezed her eyes shut, ignoring her beating heart. This was what she wanted.

Her son didn’t look much like her. As he grew, she’d tried to find her own features in him, but most of them seemed to be from strangers. The only familiar feature was Edith’s nose and her mother’s height; he was tall for his age.

The wind howled in her ears, drowning out her thoughts. She would have preferred being unable to see the lethal drop below her, slipping into the darkness. But no, she could see the waves crashing against each other, tearing against the cliff face. 

She wondered how her son would react, when his babysitter brought him back to find the space where she should be gone. Would they find her body, washed up somewhere a few days later, or would she disappear into the rain? 

Would he react like she did, with vague indifference? 

She really did want to go home. 

With a silent curse, she got to her feet. She let herself lean forward, hoping the wind would do the job. And yet she stayed firmly rooted on solid ground. 

Well that was that. She took a few hesitant steps back. And then she turned around, walking blindly in the rain, trying to find her car in the pitch black, all the while disappointment coursed through her, bitter and heavy.

She couldn’t see her own hands in front of her face anymore, staggering across the ground like a new born, wondering each time when she put her foot down if it would hit earth or carry on falling. She wondered if she would die anyways, swallowed up by the storm. Cases like that were not uncommon.

She could have spent minutes or hours walking around in circles, her vision and hearing going static, until she felt her knees collide with a solid object. Her car. Placing her hands on the metal she fumbled her way to a side window, fingers catching on air until she felt a door handle. She fell in, bringing the rain in the car with her. 

She was no warmer than she was before, and the car was dark and unwelcoming. She nearly forgot to close the door, using her remaining strength to pull it closed. 

Now she was cold, wet, and exhausted.  

She had no clue as to what the time was, whether her son had arrived home to find her gone or if it had been less than half an hour. She waited until the rain had let up to drive home, if she had crashed finding her way back to the car wouldn’t have been worth the effort. 

She couldn’t help the shame taking over her core as she drove into a familiar village, down a familiar street, into a familiar parking lot. No one was there to watch and yet she felt thousands of eyes watching. 

She arrived home. Dingy and old and covered in mold, she felt nothing at the sight of it. The cliff edge had felt more comfortable. She showered. She changed clothes. She got a blanket. She was no longer cold, and now she was dry.

She sat and waited, unmoving, until the front door swung open, the rain coming in, and then her son was there, giggling and smiling despite being soaked. It made her want to burst into tears, but she smiled and got up, wrapped her son in the blanket.

And when Clara looked really close, she fancied her son had her same smile.