Here Is a Heart

I've been planning two tattoos since I found Cory's tattoo list last July.  One of them is the heart I'm about to tell you about; the other will be two birds, preferably sparrows...a mama, and a baby.  Birds as tattoos mean a variety of positive things:  freedom, peace, joy of living.  Mine will mean all of those to me, and will take it one step further.  If you've seen Cory's art on display or pictures online, you may have noticed, she was an avid Stephen King fan.  I raised her well, that one.  (Smile).

The movie The Dark Half was just unfortunate, but the book was great.  There was a phrase in it, "the sparrows are flying" that one of the character's used to communicate that he was having an out of body experience.  This became Cory's secret code if we were out around others, and she began hearing voices.  It was a quietly whispered plea for me to be aware she was having a hard time, and if it got to too much, she would need to bail.

Well, maybe the ONLY thing I can be happy about in losing her is I know that where she is, my baby girl is not hearing those stupid voices.  She is free from that.  She is experiencing peace.  She is quiet in her mind.  She knows joy.

She wants me to follow her.  So the sparrows- baby, then Momma- will fly across my wrist, placed  there in the case things ever get particularly dark again, I will see that baby bird and remember all she endured.  That, if nothing else, will stop me from slicing open my wrist.  I'm not gonna lie; there were some times I could have used that this past year.

So the heart-

Seeing her at the funeral home for the first time was a trauma in itself.  It many ways, my brain reacted the same way it did on the road.  It could not, could not, take it all in.  At the road, there were minute details that my brain latched onto, refusing to take it all in...her twisted arm, her blue lips...those images are etched into my brain, and cannot be scrubbed clean- they are deep into the grooves.

So at the funeral home, although my eyes took in the small cut under her eye, and the deep gash along her forehead, carefully covered with a discreet fringe of bangs, it was a tiny scratch on one hand, in between the webbing of her thumb and first finger that I focused on.  It was all I could handle.  At that time, I did not know the extent of her injuries- that horror wasn't shared with me until she was already in the ground.

What do you do when you are standing above your child's lifeless body?  Well, I can't speak for everyone, but for this Momma, I found the first boo boo my eyes happened across and began kissing it non-stop, as if I could remedy this unthinkable situation with a deeply engrained habit, logical thought never once overriding  my pitiful attempts to comfort her or somehow bring her back from the dead with a mother's kiss.  Out of my mind?  Yes, ma'am. And yes, sir.

I knew immediately when I saw the tiny, imperfect heart she'd drawn on her tattoo wish list that it would go in that exact place on my own hand.  How could it not?

What does it mean?
 I think it's Cory's way to remind me to keep going and keep loving- love myself, love my family, love her little brother.  I can't make things different for her, and at this point I realize that she may not even want them to be.  But she would want her Madre to be the mother to Jacob that I was to her.  He was her baby, too, and he deserves no less.  He deserves my heart, which I've been horribly afraid to give him since July 5, 2012.  Hey, Mom, don't forget Jacob...he needs you, too.

That girl is wise beyond her years.  It's time I started listening.