5742 Days, Anniversary Edition by Anne-Marie Cockburn

Author:Anne-Marie Cockburn [Cockburn, Anne-Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Infinite Ideas Ltd
Published: 2014-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Friday 13th September: Day 55

I looked up what half a gram of powder looks like on Google yesterday. Such a tiny amount of powder wiped out a beautiful human life. If she had taken a tiny bit less, would she be here right now or was her number up regardless?

It’s drizzly outside, the sky is grey and the trees are completely still. It looks like a photograph; nothing is moving, but I can hear the traffic to indicate signs of life. I hear the bin lorry and realise I’ve forgotten to put the green wheelie bin out yet again. How can it be Friday again already? Eight weeks to the day tomorrow … I’ve lived ten lifetimes in the past eight weeks. The summer is but a blur to me; I have no recollection or memories of what my girl and I did together this summer apart from the horror story that unfolded. One to forget, but there’s no chance of that happening.

I imagine myself as an elderly woman and wonder what will be going through my head then. Will I have kept Martha alive in my memory; will she always be there or will that be too much of a burden? I’m sure I’ll always think about how old she would be had she still been alive. I’m sure I’ll think of her when I see her friends settling down and embarking on their careers and marriages and I’ll look up and wonder. The luxury of choice, I think. My choices aren’t entirely limited, but what I would really choose isn’t within the realms of possibility.

Tonight my parents are taking me out to dinner. This will be our first family dinner without Martha. Another first, but they all have to happen. The word Christmas pops into my head and I promptly dismiss it. It rattles my brain and my head spins. Shops full of sparkly stuff and music on repeat driving the staff mad. We’ll all be going mad, but for different reasons. “Oh I wish it could be Christmas every day …” hmmm … I wish it could be 19th July 2013 and I was having an important conversation with Martha about drugs and she really understood the dangers rather than the allure, and her death was avoided. I wish.

I speak to my mum who tells me she’s ill. Poor thing, she’s seen me almost die of shock over the past two months and is grieving over the loss of her first grandchild, her immune system must be shot. I’m relieved that we’re cancelling the first Martha-free family dinner, but it’s only putting off the inevitable. Like the funeral, it has to happen sometime.

I receive an email and see the words ‘sorry for the loss of your child’ within the text. Loss? I think. She’s not lost – I almost wish she were. But she’s not coming back. I then think of Madeleine McCann’s family and wonder how it must be when there’s a glimmer of hope that your child is still somewhere on this planet.

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