Dear Rudy,
There’s something in the back of my throat. I can’t feel it when I sleep, or in those few moments as I’m waking before I remember what happened. All the rest of the time, though, it’s like dread, or a pulsating, spinning, black hole that sucks life out of every good moment. It makes it hard to swallow. It makes it hard to breathe. I don’t know if it will ever go away, but when I woke up this morning, it felt smaller. And I felt my whole body exhale.
Maybe these letters are helping, like Dr Lim said they would, or maybe they are completely pointless because you don’t exist anymore to read them. Sometimes I think of you as somewhere far away, maybe Japan, because I know you always wanted to go there. But you’re not in Japan, are you Rudy. You’re in a little ceramic jar in Mum and Dad’s wardrobe and that’s it, forever. I’m mad about it, because it’s so wrong, and permanent, and out of my control. And I’m sad, of course; I’m still doing heaps of crying. But all of those feelings are starting to exist a little better along with my other feelings, like my school stress and social exhaustion and enjoyment of work. I don’t have to keep them locked away as much; they’ve lost a bit of their nuclear power.
It’s like we’ve all been bracing ourselves, waiting for the impact of ‘one year on’. We’ve done a summer without you, a Christmas, all of our birthdays, a winter. It’s harder in some ways, because I’m starting to forget tiny details that I want to remember forever, like how you liked your tea. It was black, strong, but was it one sugar or two? I don’t know. I change my mind about it all the time. I bet you never thought you’d miss out on so much. That’s the most upsetting thing, I think, all of the things you’ll miss: my graduation, weddings, babies, Ollie’s whole life, basically.
One day we’ll reach a point where you’ll have been dead for longer than you were ever alive, and that is unacceptable. You are supposed to be the one who helps me through the hard stuff. You’re supposed to babysit my kids when I need a break. You are supposed to be alive. You’re two years older than me so it’s acceptable for you to eventually be dead before me, but I’m supposed to be so old by that point that I can deal it. I would have coping tools by then. I would be able to look at your life and say it was ‘well lived’. Instead it’s always going to be ‘cut short’.
I went to the jetty to take a look this morning. I walked all the way there. Mum had taken Ollie to soccer training and Dad was mowing the lawn. I can’t stand the sound of the mower, but that wasn’t the real reason I went. It felt important to be where you breathed your last breath, where you were taken from us. I imagined the darkness and the feeling of panic. They have fixed the jetty, by the way. It’s like it had never been knocked into the water by a one-million-dollar stolen boat at all. I thought about you splashing desperately, and I thought about you being still. I thought it would bring me some kind of feeling, peace or acceptance or something. All I could think was that it was an uneventful place to die, pretty grubby and not really that nice. It’s not as if you planned it, but still. If onlys will wreck my head if I focus on them too much. If only you’d found a way out of the water. If only you hadn’t come up with the idea of taking someone’s boat in the first place. If only you were less intoxicated. If only there’d been an early-morning jogger or a dog walker or a cyclist… If only things weren’t how they are, I guess. But I can’t change anything, so what is the point of thinking about that?
Love, Erin