Title: A Few Bright Daffodils.
Category: VA, minor character death.
Archiving. Yes, just tell me where please.
Spoilers: None.
Classification. Nothing offensive here.
Disclaimer: Obviously, they're not mine. They belong to Chris Carter, TenThirteen productions and Fox . Heaven-Haven by Gerad Manley Hopkins is used with out permission, but with affection.
Special thanks to Wen for her advice.
Feedback: I'll love you forever. To nightgarden@hotmail.com
Summary: Death is never easy...

We buried her yesterday. It was a beautiful funeral, a gorgeous final curtain, the only thing about it that was pretty. Something salvaged from the ugliness of death. Bill and I went to the funeral home the day before. The room where she lay was stark, a few pictures scattered around in a vain attempt to make the place seem less clinical. A light April shower pattered the roof, drumming out its own tunes and rhythms. The room echoed with an ear shattering silence that sat around her dark hair, fanned out and fibrous on the pillow. She was unnatural there, dressed in white with garishly rouged cheeks. She never wears white, and I stared at the attendant fiercely, wanting to scream at him, to strip off this falseness that wasn't her, to hammer his chest with my fists, until he understood.
Instead, I bit my lip, turned and left.


We buried my mother yesterday. It was sudden, a massive stroke that captured her body so completely that she had no hope of escaping from its bindings. The next door neighbour found her when she went around to borrow something that I neither know nor care about. We buried her next to Missy. Perhaps it would have been fitting to scatter her with my father, but she never liked the ocean much, didn't love its cold, capturing arms. She loved her home, her children most of all. So we put her next to Missy, mother and daughter together for an eternity.

She loved so many other things. She loved daffodils and old movies; Frank Sinatra and spring days. She was the angel of our youths: first aider, cook, emotional crutch and giver of unconditional love. She was our stability when we moved so much, father and mother all in one.

We decorated the church with daffodils; a scattering of nosegays of every type, brightening the place with their lights of orange and yellow. The wooden beams sloped slyly to the floor, warm breeze from the doorway darting in among them. This was just another goodbye that they would witness. The tiny church was packed. I knew it would be-- my mother was close to many. I stood at the front, between Charlie and Tara and Bill, and though Bill had one hand on my shoulder, and Charlie gripped my hand so tightly it ached, I somehow couldn't feel there, felt unable to connect myself to this. I suppose I was angry. Angry at the injustice of it all, at the unfairness of a vengeful God. I was left with just Bill and Charlie, and this was injustice; that I had lost people who had never done anything except love. One by one, leaving me the only girl with my two brothers. And they had something already; they had their wives, their kids. And I was lonely, a deep hurt in the pit of my gut that threatened to spread and engulf me.
 
That part of the ceremony where the family and friends get up to speak is always the worst. And it was no less bad because I would be speaking. Getting up there in front of all those people was one of the hardest things I have ever done. I didn't trust myself to be eloquent enough, so I chose a poem. Perhaps this was a cop-out, perhaps it was better than me making woefully inadequate mutterings at the congregation.


"I have desired to go   
Where springs not fail,
  To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be 
Where storms not come
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, 
And out of the swing of the sea."

Heaven-Haven. Gerad Manley Hopkins. He seemed right, fitting and beautiful. A devoted Catholic; Mom would have appreciated that. I got through it, just about, feeling the fist in my throat that would choke me. My eyes ached with the tears that they threatened to spill. Charlie did something he rarely does- he hugged me, and for a moment I was safe again. I didn't cry. Instead I turned and faced front, Mom's horrible coffin staring me in the face. I sent a silent prayer to a long-neglected god for a good place for her affection and kindness, for her understanding.

Later, after we had watched her deadwood prison sink into the ground, after we had tossed a few bright daffodils after her, and after everyone else had drifted away, I leant against a tree. The rough bark scratched my back, gnarled lumps nudged my vertebrae. I stared out across the cemetery, almost blinded in the late afternoon spring sunshine. The rays dappled the ground, shifting sunspots that rippled and faded. And only then did I allow myself to cry. I sobbed, great racking things that hurt with their ferocity, my face slippery hot and soaking wet. My nose streamed with messy snot, and I swabbed at it with a tissue, not really caring. I bit my lip, and the metal rolled across my tongue and twisted itself around my teeth. Sliding my back down the tree, I felt the hardness of it, and in an odd way that reassured me. And crouching on the damp earth I cried and bled and sank into the soil.

I could have been there hours. I was there long enough to get shivery-cold in the fading sun, long enough to have my lips turn cracked and dried and salty, and long enough for my eyes to turn puffy red with crying. The headstones in the cemetery were white ghosts in the shadows of dusk and they crept and murmured and drifted across the impossibly smooth lawns.

I did something that I hadn't done in a very long time. I walked to where my mother and Missy lay, and I knelt down and prayed. I said every prayer I could remember, and a few more besides. I petitioned a god that I professed not to care for, asking Him with carmine-rimmed eyes for some justice, to stop taking them away, to let me love someone.

I didn't get an answer. I didn't expect one.

All I wanted to do was crawl in with them, to slip under their skin, to write off the last five years. Just for one more minute with them.

I could see the moon. It was hanging in the not-yet-dark sky, a glowing, shimmering orb. It cast little fingers of shadow over where I knelt, caressing the darkened soil, blowing silver on the breeze. A tiny bouquet of white daisies lay brown and dying at the foot of Missy's headstone. Their heads drooped forlornly, delicate petals decimated by time.  I picked them up, clenched my fist around them; and the petals crumbled to fine dust in my fingers. I opened my palm to the wind, and tiny flakes of flower floated away from me on the nibbling breeze, darting and dancing, to settle in some distant field and become the earth again.

And I stood up, brushed myself down, and took one last look at their graves. Because I knew that that was what Mom and Missy were.

Forever daisies on the breeze.
~~~~
End
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