You were only a month shy of your thirteenth birthday when you died, Brendan.
I noticed early patches of downy facial hair as I studied you in your coffin during the wake. Your beginning at your end.
I’m sorry about what happened, one of the girls from Sammy’s class said as she traipsed past, but she didn’t meet my eyes.
You were the first dead body I ever saw, Brendan. It wouldn’t be the last. Sammy was too scared to come into the room where everybody was crying and flinging themselves across the wooden cover at the base of the two pine boxes – the ones with carved crosses. A neighbour had placed a scruffy football on the table by the photos of you in your school uniform. Someone should wash that, I thought absently, and continued to absorb the slackness of your face. Committing it to memory, learning this new version of you by heart.
They say that seeing someone who’s passed away helps with closure, that it’s healing in some way. But I presume that doesn’t apply to those who are responsible for a death. Because seeing you lying there with your eyes closed, all I wanted to do was shake you awake, scream at you to live, please live Brendan, please… like I’d shouted at you on the dirty banks of our lake when I eventually dragged you out.
You were freezing cold; your pyjamas sodden when the lake belched you out, discarded you cruelly and watched me kiss you in vain.
‘Please live, Brendan. Don’t leave me. Please don’t die.’
I remember those desperate screams. I hear them when I shut my eyes still. I picture Roe slumped against the wooden church bench during the service, trying to understand the magnitude of what her sister had just done.
I bubbled with a caustic concoction of rage and shock that would spend a lifetime spilling over, eroding everything I touched.
At the eulogy, the mean priest with the limp – the one we’d been afraid of as kids – talked about the mystery of life.
But this was no mystery. This was death, plain and simple. And it was all my fault.
Because I couldn’t stop my mother.