To Speak the Words: 5 years 1 month 5 days ago

Four o’clock in the morning is a lie, an illusion, like infomercials and New Year’s resolutions, for the time looks as much like morning as the softly curving letters of cancer look like a gnawing and malicious disease, or as a draining coma feels like reviving sleep.

My transition from warm containment in the womb of sleep to jarring exposure in the open-air of full consciousness was slow to begin as I struggled to reach the strained whisper I could hear swirling in the ether above my body.  After many laboured breaths, I widened my eyes with a pop.  My eyebrows puckered in confusion, eyes refocusing to recognize the face mere inches from my own.  A face I knew should be familiar before it could be seen by my newly opened eyes.  My mother had been whispering. 

Surrounding her was not the welcoming reflection of sunshine on bare and chipped white walls, having penetrated my east-facing window.  Surrounding her was the absence of light, of colour, that I had seen hours before when I forced my body to rest.

Crouching at my bedside, the side of the bed I had been sleeping in since the last night in my crib, my mother hesitantly stroked my hair as one might comfort an abused foster child.  The corners of her mouth were up-turned, not in a smile so much as a grimace, forming a canoe burdened by curvy letters and about to overflow.  The empty spaces of our pupils aligned.  Hers harboured a story.  Not one of birth.  Not one of canoe trips on shiny lakes.  But on no other morning would this story have shocked me less.

“Grandpa died this morning…”

Watching as the canoe capsized, it was time for my first words.  It was time for me to whisper.

"It's because last night on the phone Adam and I said goodbye to him."