Histopathology
When my dad had visited me in rehab, he’d brought little offerings to make me feel better: a newspaper clipping about the zoo, little sachets of miso soup, a small posy of violets. And, one day, a pomegranate. Everything about it was exquisite. Once my visitors had gone home for the day, I held it in my hand—a crimson magical orb. It felt too beautiful to cut up.
The next morning, I was just waking up when one of the catering ladies brought in my breakfast. She asked how I was and, as I struggled to get a sentence out of my pasty, still-asleep mouth, she sighted the pomegranate on the bedside table. ‘This! Good antioxidants! Very good for your healing!’ It was both an admonishment and a command, but kindly ones, so I was happy to comply.
I’d eaten a pomegranate before, but never dissected one like I did that day. The process of cutting into the fruit and cracking it open felt like some kind of brutal surgery, the seeds bleeding into my fingers. I peeled away chunks of pith and peel, at once leathery and delicate—football red on the outside and a soft cream on the inside. Row on honeycombed row of translucent seeds were lodged into the pith like teeth in gums, each compartment veiled from the others with a filmy rose–yellow silk membrane. I prised them out one by one, and took photos of all of it: the broken scraps of peel, the membrane, the seeds. Here was something that, even when split apart and broken, only revealed more beauty.
A few days after I was released from rehab, and could join Rima and the girls in our new house, a pomegranate tree was delivered. It was a gift, in Z’s name, from dear friends who lived overseas. It stood, green and hopeful, on the porch as the summer days and weeks wore on—hot and dry. I feared it would die there. I almost willed it to die there, and then was torn by guilt at the idea that I could kill my daughter’s memory in plant form. Nonetheless, we waited.
At first we were waiting for the placenta. I wanted to bury those cells that belonged to both Z and me underneath the tree. Our midwives at the hospital had dutifully saved the placenta. The histopathologists at the hospital were holding it, after having examined it to confirm the cause of Z’s death. I had to look up what histopathology meant. It was from the Greek: histos ‘tissue’, pathos ‘suffering’, and logia ‘study of’—the study of suffering tissue. The histopathologists had not met Z or me, but there they were, making a study of our suffering by examining the bloody organ that had joined us; at least, until it came unplugged.
When I tried to follow up the placenta issue, we were invited to a meeting at the hospital. The people there put on their understanding faces, and made ‘Sorry for your loss’ noises. The doctor seemed horrified by our predicament. The placenta had been treated with formaldehyde, making it toxic. I imagined it floating in a jar and asked, ‘Does that mean you want to keep it?’
‘No, no, but it has to be disposed of as medical waste. Not so great to plant in your garden, especially if you want to grow food there.’ It was a very long way of saying, ‘No, you can’t have it.’
The doctor carefully watched us absorb this information. I wasn’t sure what she was expecting; perhaps a hysterical grieving woman screaming, ‘Give me back my placenta!’ I was tempted, but didn’t have the energy for staging a revolt this time.
There were pragmatic considerations too. If I went leaking this grief all over the place every time I was triggered, I’d be a big mess. We’d had to live with what had happened for over seven weeks now and were weary of it. It was not a surprise anymore; this was our banal, everyday horror. ‘Forgive me,’ I wanted to say. ‘Forgive me if I don’t seem as shocked and as saddened as you—the person who has just heard this awful news. Believe me, we still feel it, and there are plenty of moments when I turn a corner and bump into a new aspect of the horror and feel the shock all over again. But most of the time we have to keep a lid on it, for our own sanity. To mix metaphors, we can’t keep picking at our scabs just to demonstrate our wounds.’
I remembered going to see a dear friend, F, maybe a week and a half after her brother’s funeral, when we were both in second year at university. I was distraught—for her, at the thought of losing my own brother, and at the idea of death itself. Her calm surprised me, and now it made sense—that weary familiarity when you’ve been wearing grief for a while, so that it begins to feel normal, when you’ve cried all you can for the moment.
So, by that time the fight had gone out of me. The poor histopathologists; I think it was probably quite odd for them to have the owner of some tissue they had preserved and examined show up and demand it back. From then on, we were no longer waiting on medical bureaucrats but on my own battered ability to make decisions and to dig a hole.
The drought had killed a small tree in the front yard. It stood, unrepentantly ugly, between our bay window and the front fence. I didn’t know what kind of tree it was. Much as I liked the idea of a garden, gardening itself was still something I thought old people did. It was nearly March by the time we started digging the tree out, when the Preston clay was at its hardest. I threw the pick at the ground, over and over again, carving out the rough outline of a circle around the dead tree. The arc of the pick swinging up, the rush down and the ‘thuck’ of contact, the sheer solidity of the earth, was a relief. I didn’t need to weep, or think, or speak. Just dig. My convalescent limbs were sore and sweaty from the work. I took a long bath with some luxury bath powder my sister had given me for Christmas, just two days before the accident.
The next day I carried bucket after bucket of cold, milky water across the porch and out to our hole. I gave the dead tree a relaxing bath in my second-hand bathwater. The clay held the water almost as well as the enamel bathtub. The digging, to my regret, had to be postponed while the water level slowly soaked lower and lower until I braved the mud and worried away at the dead tree’s root system, carving away the stiff mud. My dad and, occasionally, Rima took turns, but I was alone for the last bit, when the tree developed a tantalising wobble, like that of a loose tooth. Even then, it took nearly an hour for it to give way with a satisfying crunch, the small dead tree suddenly lurching, so that it looked more dead and more out of place than before. Remembering what it was like to feel strong in my unfamiliar, resurrected body, I lifted it partway out of the hole before calling for help.
It left a crater in the front yard; a crater I tended lovingly with clay-breaker and compost, before we finally eased the sickly looking pomegranate tree into the hole. Promptly upon arriving in its new home, the tree dropped the rest of its leaves for autumn, leaving us to wonder about its survival until spring. Miraculously, come August, there were tiny red buds. Having eschewed the colour red for autumn yellows, our little pomegranate tree wore red for spring instead.
I would prune the miniature roses at the front of the house, making a tiny posy to bring inside, and then carrying the loose petals and dead flowerheads over to the pomegranate tree. I would sprinkle the petals at the base of the tree, giving it a composting carpet of pink, red and yellow–gold–pink. It became a ritual. It was a chance to have a natter with my beautiful girl, to feel the leaves brush at the side of my face like small hands. I miss you, my little love. I wish you were in the house, being loud. I would kneel in the front yard, chatting to a pomegranate tree. I was okay with being the crazy grieving mother of the neighbourhood if it meant I could chat with my daughter. Or maybe they thought I was just a very attentive gardener?