Pearl

by Siân Hughes

When someone takes their life, they don’t only steal the future out from under our feet, they also desecrate their past. It makes it hard to hold on to the good things about them. And no one deserves to be judged on the worst five minutes of their life, even if those five minutes turn out to be their last.

If you are a mother you are always to blame. I know that now. If you did not give birth to them too slowly or too quickly, underfeed them, overfeed them, pick them up, set them down, push them forward, hold them back, love them too little or too much, you are to blame for their very existence. You loaded them with your own dodgy genetic package and sent them out into the world to deal with its particular set of time bombs.

Forgetting is not the worst thing. Remembering is not the worst thing either. The worst thing is when you have forgotten, and then you remember. It catches you out. You forgot for a moment, a day, a week, a month, but the effect is the same each time you remember. You feel it rushing back around your lymphatic system, and you remember the hurt. And there is a part of you that thinks, perhaps the pain is optional now? What might it be like to live without it? This is treachery. You hate yourself for it.