Maybe She Could

I made dinner tonight.  Spaghetti with a decidedly anti-climatic jarred sauce.  Not my best work, I admit, but I still cooked.  Yay, me.

So...

lately, I've been seeing Cory when she was little, dressed in corduroy jumper dresses with cable-knit tights- one in particular that had cat faces for pockets on each side- her hair pulled away from her round little cheeks.  I cannot look at pictures of her when she was little, and haven't since the funeral, but they've been coming to my mind a lot lately.  She was the tinest slip of a girl with an incredibly advanced vocabulary, and a temper like you wouldn't believe.

 I can remember picking her up and resting her comfortably on my bony hip, and just toting her around, and I especially remember squeezing our faces close together in front of the mirror, "Look at those pretty girls!"  How she would smile!  All the selfies we took over the last three years or so of her life were just that old game reinvented, weren't they?

Yes.  That is such a bittersweet realization.

Now, then, let's get on to the guilt-begat-panic-attack business about going to Thanksgiving.  I'd like to think my therapist likes me, but I'm certain I was wearing her patience thin this last visit as I tried to explain why going to the holiday seemed like a slight to my girl.  All I could think about, as she reasoned, and I came out with wilder and yet wilder excuses, was how Cory's separation anxiety had been- as a child, and again during her mental illness.

I nodded in all the right places to my kind lady's logic, but refused to agree. "I left her!"  I insisted, tears hot on my face.  "Wasn't it bad enough that I left her to die on the road?"  I cried, the sobs coming from deep within my chest.  My therapist has now seen me in every sort of condition; all formalities have been waved.

"But you didn't.  You didn't leave her to die on the road.  You would never have done that."  she said calmly, oozing of logic and objectivity.

"Why does it make you feel so guilty to have shared the holiday with your family?"  she asked again.

I took a deep breath and said this,
"I showed her my back."

I'm not sure if anyone besides Cory and I know just how significant that one action can be.  It is the reason I nearly killed myself working forty hours and driving to Grand Rapids every single night she was hospitalized.  I would never let her feel abandoned by me.  Never.  To be someone's rock, you have to stay.

By now, my therapist was more than a little misty-eyed herself.  She, too, took a deep breath, and said this,
"Maybe instead of you showing her your back, she could be hugging you from behind and looking over your shoulder."

I burst into tears.
Maybe she could.