Well, I have never been so fortunate as to have the opportunity to have a child of my own. Maybe one day I will. Who knows? However, that is not the issue at hand. What I want to stretch is something that I have learned in life, and that is that people who lose a child are very likely to never really recover from their emotional loss. Yes, the wound might heal, but the scar will forever remain.
If you lose a lover, scars can heal. Not so with people who lose children. My parents lost a child. My own sister died many years ago in a tragic accident. She was only 21.
It is many years ago. We have all moved on long time ago. But despite my sister not being here with us any more, her legacy still lives on. Even if it is sometimes a lie legacy. A false legacy. Yes. I am speaking it as it is. Not because I do not love my family or anything like that. Because I get frustrated for one, but also because I want to share my experience, I bet I’m not the only one on earth. But what on earth am I talking about?
There is a term that smart people use. It is called confabulation. It applies, I think, if I’m correct, here. When I was a kid, like all kids, I used to have my own mannerisms. I say to say funny things and do funny and specific things that I and only I did. For example, I used to say, look, the sun is eating my ice cream. This is something I used to say when the sun was melting my ice cream and it was starting to become messy. Another example from when I was a teenager. People often say “you shouldn’t have” every time they receive a special treat or gift or some kind of usually undeserved favour. I used to do the opposite just for the sake of being funny. I used to say, “you should have!”.
Now, very often, and especially with my mother, I find that she time and again tell me that “your sister always said, that the sun is eating my ice cream” or, “as your sister used to say, you should have”...
Is not the mind the most worrying thing? Is it not terrifying? What this proves to me, is how we as people choose the history we like. We take different events and blend them into something brand new. We forget the bad things and remember the things we like (luckily so), but then often we recreate the past in a glorified way. In a way we would really have like it to have been.
I am so very tempted to become angry at my mother for this. And I have! I have become very angry at times. I often just want to shout, what in god’s name do remember that was nice about me? Is it all just about my dead sister? Or, what is wrong with you mother? Later on I used to politely correct her, but I am starting to accept that I am fighting a losing battle.
Maybe there is freedom for me in letting her believe whatever it is she wants to believe. However, and this is what I want to say, I have gained extremely much from these experiences. I have learned how the trauma of losing a child can have an effect on there very way you remember your past. It can shape the way you see the world by forcing you to “remember” non-existing incidents of your past. But above all I have learned to accept. There are certain battles that you just cannot win in life no matter how hard you fight. No matter what the preacher or the motivational speaker or the leader say about changing the world and never giving up. If you fight long enough and lose enough times, you will start to feel like a loser, and that you are not. You have merely followed the wrong strategy and your alternative route to victory by means of accepting.
(697 Words)
|
Print this bite
Show the next latest work
