The Book Mara Left for Me

            That summer in 1982 Cory and I spent three days together in the woods, creeks, and steep trails of his home. One of these days was taken up entirely by a fishing expedition up the winding waterfalls of White Branch, which is, in my opinion, the best trout-fishing stream in the world. As we got further up the creek and it got smaller, the fish got easier to catch. Together we cornered a 13-inch rainbow trout in a shallow pool. He scared the fish my way, and I waited, hands above the water, until it sought shelter under the rock I stood next to. In one fluid movement, I grabbed both its head and tail, yanking it out of the cold water, flopping and dripping, slippery and splendid.

            I had never been so proud of myself before, and frankly, I’m not sure I have ever been since. Cory patted me on the back. This was an everyday occurrence to him. He put the fish on the stringer with the other three he’d caught with his pole and headed for home. I sat down, breathless.

            “What’s wrong?” Cory asked, shouldering his pack. “Nothing.” was all I could say. And it was true. Everything was right. I just didn’t want it to end. But since we had hiked a good five miles up the creek, it was a good thing we did head home shortly thereafter. We barely made it back before dark, and dark was 9:30 or so, midsummer. I was so hungry I could feel it from my throat down to the pit of my stomach. Veronica fried our fish in cornmeal, made beans and biscuits and yellow squash, and watched us devour everything in sight with satisfaction. Nothing has ever again tasted so good.

            There are those who would argue with the assertion that words make things real, but I’m not one of them. Words do make things real sometimes, as real as a skinned knee or a bouquet of violets. I knew that the story I told Kyla was true; that was not in question. We both loved the book, her dad and I. We both read it. It made sense to both of us in a way we couldn’t explain at 11 or 12. We lived in a rural area with parents who were educated, and chose a simpler lifestyle. We understood that the families who had been in the mountains for generations had a different understanding of the life we were learning, and that it’s a different sort of choice. Cory’s family had settled in the valleys of southwest Virginia much earlier than I had; when I met him at eight-years-old he already knew so much more then me. Carrying water and working in the garden and milking the goats had become routine. I was still transfixed by the novelty of it. I knew all this, but up until the moment I held the Muppets notebook and saw the words read the book Mara left for me, I didn’t remember that I had given him the book. Irrefutable evidence? Perhaps not. But it was enough for me.

            Cory has been dead four and a half years, after being alive for only 31. Sometimes the grief that walked with me on a daily basis for so long is something I miss, just because it is so familiar. But it was not something that I really wanted back, not something that I couldn’t wish to leave behind.

            Someone once compared the early stages of grieving someone close to you to walking around with a low-grade fever. Everything seems surreal, like you’re looking at it through a filter. Senses are at once heightened and dulled, there’s a haze covering any sense of normalcy, and things are altered in a way that seems obvious to you, but no one else can really see.

            I didn’t cry after dropping Kyla off. Not until I got home, and wandered around useless for a couple of hours, not able to read or watch a movie or do anything but flit aimlessly from task to task, not finishing any of them. As I stood at the stove and waited for water to boil for tea, leaning over the kettle, tears mixed with the steam on my face and I sniffled and choked a little as I poured the water. I retreated to the couch to cry in earnest, no one else there to hear me, not sure what it was that needed to get out. There are those tears that make you immediately feel better, like something’s lifted off of you and you can breathe again. These were not those kind of tears. When I finally stopped crying, I felt emptier and sadder, and still was not sure exactly why.

            It was close to a week later before I realized that the grief I’d felt that day was the grief of losing my childhood friend, the person I knew before we knew enough to know we wanted to be lovers and partners, before our lives were filled with hard choices and obligations. I’d grieved the loss of his body next to me in our bed. I’d railed against the responsibilities that had been his and were now firmly on my shoulders along with all the ones that had already been mine. I’d reconciled myself to the changes in our life. Complicated grief—not that any is truly simple. But this was perhaps the simplest version I’d known so far. I lost someone who I looked up to, who I respected, who taught me about the mountains that I fell in love with but had no idea how to handle. Someone who I looked forward to seeing when I missed other kids my age, a peer in a way I’d never had one before, and will never have again.

            In Bridge to Terebithia, Jesse’s best friend Leslie drowns in the creek they have to swing over to reach the mythical land they have named Terebithia. When I read this book at 11, the only person I could imagine losing in that way, and grieving in the way Jesse grieved Leslie, was Cory. That’s why I gave him the book. And we both understood that it was the same way for him, that we could say; “It’s one of my favorite books,” with an unspoken understanding that we didn’t really understand, because it was decades later before I actually had to face that loss, and at that point it consisted of so much more than an imaginary world. It was a real world that I lost, nearly my entire world, and the one that I have built to replace it barely resembles the one before.

            Except for Kyla. She looks like Cory more and more as she grows older, and her personality is far more like his than mine. She is now the age I was when I met him, and sometimes it feels as if time is passing itself in the wrong direction. When Veronica brought her home after their day together, we read the rest of Bridge to Terebithia, and this time, I didn’t try to hide my crying. She did not cry with me. She patted me on the arm, asked me if I was ok, and left me to read through my tears, which was exactly what I needed to do. And this time, I did feel better. I have no idea if sharing this with her so directly and intimately is the right thing to do, any more than I know if I’m talking about sex and drugs in the best way to get my message across to her. Damn, sometimes I’m not even sure what my message is. But I do know this: we’ve gone through this together, and we always will. She misses him and grieves the loss of him in a different way as she reaches different phases of her childhood, and there is an emptiness there that I cannot fill, not ever. It’s just a part of her, one that will necessarily form the way she looks at her life. And I won’t avoid speaking about Cory. I talk about him whenever I get the opportunity. There will be a point at which the things she wants to know cannot be filtered through my low grade fever of grief, she will have to look on her own, and decide for herself. In the meantime, she has my interpretations. And occasionally, other words that make him real, because he is not as real to her as he is to me; she only had him for the first 3 ½ years of her life.

            I ask her to tell me something about Cory that’s real to her, and she says, “I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean.

            “Anything,” I say. She thinks for a while.

            “He had blue eyes, like me.”

            I press her for more, but she gets frustrated with me, and lays on the bed, pressing her feet against the back of my desk chair repeatedly in a way that has me asking her repeatedly to stop. Sometimes I want it to matter to her more than it does; sometimes I’m relieved that it does not matter as much as it does to me. Or not in the same way, at least. 

            Single parenthood is never easy, and parenthood is challenging no matter what your circumstances. We don’t always make it easier on each other. I’m distracted and unorganized, she’s headstrong and demanding. But these days, we are getting to know each other better than we ever have, and our friendship, the parts that connect beyond what we need from each other, or try to provide, is becoming more profound. This is a great comfort to me. I will always be her mother, I will always be the parent who is left. But learning who she is now is different than it would be if we were still the same nuclear family, and we need different things from each other than many families who have more typical emotional challenges. There will always be the undercurrent that shifts the flow of our decisions, always the knowledge that someone is missing. But now we have something else in common. A book. The story is nothing like our own, but grief is universal. It changes you in ways you cannot predict, and no one is immune.