Cairn

I don’t know why, but I have always felt calm in a crisis. 

When I was 16, I was in a terrible car accident. I was stopped at the bottom of a hill, waiting to make a left turn, when I happened to look in the rearview mirror and saw a car barreling toward me. I knew it was going to hit me. At that moment, everything slowed down. I noted the driver, turning and talking to the person beside her, oblivious. I thought through my options. Turn left? No, oncoming traffic. Move right to get out of the way? No, cars coming there, too. Speed up? No. I wouldn’t be able to accelerate fast enough, and then she would hit me and propel me even farther forward. My only option was to take the hit. I somehow had the presence of mind to take a deep breath and relax. I knew that the more tense and tight I was, the more injury I would sustain. So, I just relaxed my body, took a deep breath, pushed my foot down harder on the brake, made sure my steering wheel was straight, closed my eyes and waited. Breathe in and out. 

I found myself a moment later laying flat in the backseat. The intensity of the impact broke the driver side seat and sent me backwards. I was still in my lane, so no secondary impacts would be coming. I turned off my car and crawled out, noting the paint that had flaked off the accordioned back end, fallen off in complete sheets about the size of notebook paper. In a state of calm and shock, I walked slowly to the side of the road and sat down on the grass under a tree. I saw the car that hit me, spider-webbed windshield. I just sat there and waited. Breathing and waiting for help to come. 

The impact of Jonah’s death was like that. I took the hit. Everything slowed way down and I went calm. I sat quietly and waited for help. Or pain. Or something to come next. 

As I sat, I could sense an incredibly heavy weight that was ready to crush me, just behind my back and slightly above. Like an avalanche just before the tipping point of thundering release. Like standing under the rubble from a bombed building, unsafe and teetering. The wrong word, the slightest breath, a single memory, and this soft animal would be lost under the crushing river of unyielding rock. I would not survive if the weight came to land all at once. I had to dismantle the mountain for myself, moving one boulder at a time. 

Slowly, calmly, strategically, my mind began to work. I gradually began to dislodge each thought, turn it in my fingers, sensing the hum and beauty in it before laying it down. Some made me weep. Some warmed me. Some frightened me, so I let them be for a while. Some left me numb.  But I kept going. Eventually, the crushing threat diminished, although the ruins are still high. Gingerly, I still arrange the fragments around me in pattern so I don’t forget that each one of these jagged, broken stones was once placed with care and love in the building of a life. 

It has been six and a half months since Jonah left this physical world. I touch all the memories I find. I cry often, but now I can laugh often, too. I have folded his clothing, slept in his bed, wept on his pillows, worn his cologne. I talk to him all the time, and sometimes I think I hear him, too, whispering from the green shoots that spring up between the rubble. 

And so, with sorrow and tenderness, I build a new home.