It's like someone hit pause. Nearly two and a half years to the day, Tim has begun to mourn Cory. I know he had a huge job taking care of me and making arrangements directly following the accident. Beside all those tasks checked off one by one in his shaky penmanship in his little memo book was a scribbled admission, "I think I'm going crazy."
That was a handful of days after the accident, when we were up to our eyeballs in flowers, caskets, and graves. There was a small pocket of safety within that shock, and that's where Tim lived between the day Cory died and the day we buried her. Back and forth, he paced the house, he ran errands, and he told me how sorry he was. Looking into his eyes, on the rare occasion I was able to make eye contact, I remember thinking he looked panicked and afraid. How to do this? Bury a child? Bury the Cory Girl? This can't be happening.
He took such good care of me. I cried, and talked to people- sometimes not making a whole lot of sense, I'm afraid. Tim made sure things got done. He didn't have much to say back then. What could he say?
I was horrible to him. Did you know that? I was horribly, unspeakably ungrateful and just plain mean. But he still took care of me. He let me scream at him, pass out, throw up, refuse to eat or drink, pass our son dark looks, and aggressively cuss out the first cemetery keeper we met.
I was so angry at the driver, at the world, at God, but mostly at myself. I could hardly stand to be in my own company. I wanted to kick my own ass. All of it- her babyhood, her childhood, her adolescence, her mental illness, just to come to a messy, dirty end on the side of West Michigan Avenue. Really, Nick? Was that the best you could do?
What Tim didn't do was talk about Cory or what losing her felt like to him. It's only now, years later, that he's told me how it felt to walk into that flower-filled room and see her lying there in the casket, half of her bracelets intact and still on her wrist. It's only now that he'll talk about watching them lower her into the ground in front of us, and how the sound of my screams will haunt him forever. It's only now he'll tell me how much I've scared him because he wasn't sure from the day it happened that I would want to live, and he had no idea how to help me want to.
And he's angry! He wants to hurt people! Or at least one person, anyway. Is it wrong that this makes me so happy? He loved her. He did! I can only nod my agreement, and reluctantly tell him if I can't drive by her house, neither can he.
The other day, I pulled into the parking lot of my doctor's office, and paused to kick some ice and hard-packed snow off of the rocker panels over my tires. I had my big, heavy below thirty degrees Sorels on, and got the most satisfying surge when I felt a chunk go flying under the force of my foot. Before I knew it, I was kicking at all the ice, at all the snow, and kept going, kicking my tires, my car, and a nearby snowbank before I could stop myself. I was so into it, I was making gutteral noises way down in my throat like a damn dog. I stopped, breathing hard in the cold, and looking around. The parking lot was quiet, and I just stood there, the adrenaline racing through my body, feeling big, feeling strong, feeling furious, feeling powerful. I could knock down walls; I could do damage; I could kill someone. Cue the angry music...ARRRRRGHHHHHHH!!!!
Over the weekend, I watched Last House on the Left. I told Tim it was a scary movie, and it is, but I mainly wanted to watch the parents go after their daughter's rapists with sweet, deadly abandon. One guy ended up with a hammer buried in his skull and the other had his head put inside a microwave. A MICROWAVE!! Are you feeling me?
And that girl LIVED! Don't they always survive in the fricking movies? I think so often, couldn't she just have been hit? I remember running down the road to her, thinking she'd surely have a broken leg, but we'd go to the hospital, and she'd be okay. She never even made it inside the stupid ambulance. All they gave my girl was a sheet and a place in the hot sun.
Why did she have to die? And in pieces? Especially when so many others live so much longer than you'd think they have any right to. Like Tim says, "What did she ever do to anyone?"
I told my therapist, Lady, the next day that I'd watched the movie to explore my feelings of rage and need for vengeance in a safe way. What I didn't expect was to be left feeling a little hollow about my own murderous fantasies. The people in the movie who hurt the young girl about Cory's age did so willfully, purposefully. The driver was most certainly careless and negligent, but I'm not altogether convinced that she meant to run Cory down on that wretched day.
Does this make me any less angry with her? No. But I suddenly questioned if my actions of revenge would be as justified as what I've previously imagined them to be. Do you inflict blunt force trauma on someone for not paying attention? Should you? Is that fair?
I ponder this, all the while, reminding myself that however I feel is okay, and while anger is a natural part of grieving, orange is not my best color.
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