Postscript (P.S. I Love You #2)(82)

‘Now all you have to do is find a place to stay,’ Ciara says, singing, twirling a tulle scarf around, as though she’s doing ribbon acrobatics.

‘Everything I’ve looked at is so bleh. The last one I looked at had an avocado-coloured bathroom suite from the seventies.’

‘Retro is cool.’

‘Forty years without other people’s bum bacteria is cooler.’

She chuckles. ‘I think you’re making excuses. I think you know where you want to live.’

I feel the torn part of my heart letting me know it’s still there, it’s not going away. No matter how much I try to focus on everything else, it has no intention of healing without my attention. I look around my bedroom. ‘I’ll miss the memories.’

‘Gross,’ she says, teasing.

‘I don’t want to forget everything, or anything really, but I want …’ I close my eyes. ‘I want to go to sleep in a room where I don’t have an aching longing for someone who’s gone and will never come back. And I want to wake up in a room where I haven’t had the same nightmares.’

Ciara doesn’t reply and I open my eyes. She’s rummaging through another bag.

‘Ciara! I’m baring my soul here.’

‘Sorry, but,’ she whips out an old pair of knickers, ‘I’m beginning to get a sense of the painful memories you need to forget. How old are these and please tell me nobody ever saw them.’

I laugh and try to grab them from her. ‘That bag is for the trash.’

‘I don’t know, I think I could fashion these into a new hat.’ She squeezes them onto her head and poses. I pull them off her head.

‘Roots and wings,’ Ciara says, suddenly serious. ‘I was listening to you, by the way. Mathew and I went to collect some things for the shop from a woman who was selling her childhood home. Her mother passed away and it was difficult for her to sell. She asked me if it was possible for something to have both roots and wings. Keeping it helped her to hold on to her mother and their memories, selling it was giving her financial security and other possibilities. Roots and wings.’

‘Roots and wings,’ I repeat, liking it. ‘I hate goodbyes,’ I say with a sigh, and then add more as a mantra to myself, ‘But hating goodbyes is not a justification for staying.’

‘And fearing goodbyes is also not a justification for leaving first,’ Ciara finishes.

I look at her in surprise.

She shrugs. ‘Just saying.’

As we’re hauling the bags into the van, my phone rings inside the house. I run inside but still miss a call from Denise which makes my stomach churn with dread. I take a moment to calm myself and I call her back. She answers immediately.

‘I think you should come over.’

‘OK. God.’ My throat tightens.

‘Her parents just left. She wasn’t responsive but I think she knew they were there.’

‘I’ll be there as fast as I can.’

Denise’s home is calm. The main lights are off, lamps and candles light the hallways and rooms. It feels hushed, but calm, no urgency or sense of immediacy, and we all keep our voice down. Now that Denise and Tom are the official guardians for Jewel, Ginika and Jewel have been living with Tom and Denise for the past four weeks, receiving care in their home, and it has been good for Ginika, even in the condition she is in, to be in the space where her daughter will grow up, to be breathing the same air. Holding on and letting go. Tom guides me to Ginika’s bedroom, where Denise is by her side, holding her hand.

Her breathing is slow, barely there. She hasn’t been conscious for days.

I sit at her bedside and take her other hand, her right hand, her writing hand. I kiss it.

‘Hello, sweet girl.’

A mother, a daughter, a striker, a fighter. An inspiring young woman who only got a fraction of the whole, but gave me and us so very much. It doesn’t seem fair because it isn’t fair. I held Gerry’s hand as he left the world and here I am again, saying goodbye to somebody I love, and I love this girl, she got inside my heart. Witnessing this transition, saying goodbye, never gets easier, but preparing myself and helping her to feel prepared has eased the suffering, the anger, the rage that spikes when confronted with the brutal reality. They say easy come, easy go, but not in this instance. Arrival into this world is a marathon for both mother and child, life pushes to get into this world, and leaving it is a fight to stay.

Denise and I stay by Ginika’s side for the remaining hours, a gentle departure from this world as she knows it. After hanging on to her breath for so long, she takes a final inhale, and there’s no exhale as life lets go and death catches her. Though the illness was a painful one, the passing is peaceful as I promised her it would be, and as she lays still on the bed, no more fluttering eyelids, no more rise and fall of her chest, no more laboured breathing, I imagine, I hope, I wish, that the fun-filled soul that inhabited her body now has the freedom to drift and dance, swirl and soar. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but my God, fly Ginika, fly.

A moment like this, as tragic and overwhelming as it is, is an honour to witness and, perhaps selfishly, in time it will help that I was with her for the end. I will always remember how Ginika and I met, I will always remember how we parted.

As if she knows, as if she senses her own greatest loss, from the other room, Jewel awakes from her sleep with a cry.