And it hurts anyway.

A friend of mine lost a child.

It seems so common these days to hear of this kind of loss, and yet it still stands in the corner of my life, like a shadow in the periphery, the hint of something that does not happen in my vicinity. It's still something that only happens to other people, over there, on the outskirts of anything that directly affects me.

And we all try to be "good friends" when it happens. We "can't imagine the horror." We'll "pray for the family." We hug and we send plants and flowers and donations to cover the expenses because it's "the worst, simply the worst thing that could happen," right? We love our friends. We want them to know that we care.

And all the while, we really couldn't imagine the horror.

But because we're not heartless people, we try. We think about our kids, and we wonder how it would feel if this had happened to one of ours. How could we live through that phone call? How could we look our friends in the eye who are only trying to be comforting, and all the while knowing that they are sad for us, yes, but also relieved that it's not happening to them?

How would we not grow bitter and hateful and angry at everyone, including God, who doesn't really exist, because a benevolent God would never allow an innocent child to die? A benevolent God would never allow a mother to have her heart ripped right from her chest to be stomped on, to be left to rot.

How could we even get through one more day?

And I imagine the anger boiling inside me when I think of any of my children being torn from this world by any means at all. There are so many ways it could happen, and life is so fragile. I want to gather them up into a soft, pillowy cocoon so they'll never be hurt in any way. They'll be safe from torture, from fear, from pain, right?

But what if that's not even enough? What if what kills them comes from within? How do I protect them then? What kind of deals can I make? Who do I see about making a trade?

And it really doesn't matter, all this imaginary anger I feel when I think about all the things that could happen, but haven't happened.

Because I really can't imagine the horror of losing a child. Because the real horror of it will last forever, and my imagination is only good for about five minutes before I give up on thinking about that kind of Hell, because it's just too painful.

It's just too painful.

That's Her.

Whoa! It's been nine days since I posted here!
That seems impossible, since I have been reading and writing like crazy.
I've been saving all my fiction for my creative writing class this semester.  I feel as if I'm depriving my Blogger friends of  the terrifically horrific "October Specials" I've scrawled in my notebooks, but it is for a good cause, I assure you. ("Good Cause" amounts to me getting an 'A' in writing class, and that's all there is to that.)

You may or may not know that October is the month of my mom. Today is her birthday, and twenty short days from now will be her "deathday." Most of the shorts I've written lately have centered around motherhood, but none of them have been about my mother. I wrote a little bit of a shocking impromptu story in class the other night, and now my entire class probably thinks my mom was some horrible bitch who didn't love me, but that's not true. (She loved me.)

You want to know a little secret about our family? We like purple spiders. They mean love.

When my mom was alive, she would watch that TV show "Crossing Over, with John Edwards." In the intro, he explained that his dead mother would communicate her love for him with white birds. My mom decided our talisman would be purple spiders. (This decision had something to do with her sister and thrift store shopping, but that is another story.) So now, every time I see a purple spider, I think of my mom. (Did she know ahead of time that she would die on Halloween--a time of the year when purple spiders seem to be everywhere?)

I remember when she was in the hospital. Toward the end I was spending all my spare time camped out in her room. She tried to stay awake, but she slept most of the time. For some reason, I felt like I needed to be there for every waking moment. I guess I was trying to hold on to her as much as possible. I knew I'd have to let her go eventually, but I was going to soak up every tidbit of time I could get with her. She was dying, there was no denying that, but I'd be damned if I was going to sit back and wait for a phone call from some disembodied voice of some indifferent doctor. I needed to be there with her.

One day, I went down to the gift shop for a little while to stretch my legs and take in some different scenery. They had a string of the large, scary-looking purple spiders on the clearance rack. I snatched them and took them up to her room. Carefully, while she was sleeping, I arranged them so it seemed the spiders were crawling across her feet.

The nurse accused me of wanting to kill her with a heart attack, but my mom smiled when she opened her eyes and saw them.

"So you like spiders?" the nurse asked, dryly.

"I like purple ones," my mom said with a smile and then slipped back into sleep.

In the months after her passing, we would actively search for the purple spiders. We'd see them, and one of us would shout it out, as if we'd come across some rare artifact never seen before by human eyes. The fact is, there are more of them around than I realized. They're on greeting cards and in cartoons and on posters. For a while, it seemed we couldn't get away from them. Even our friends started bringing them to us in the form of jewelry and hair clips and decorative knick-knacks and what-nots. There was a huge, fuzzy, bendable spider perched in the back dash of my car for about a year. (His name was Hector, and I have no idea where he went. I only know that he's gone.)

Nowadays, we're not so quick to scoop up the spiders when we see them. We just smile to ourselves and move on with life, knowing that my mom is out there, somewhere, still loving us. I like to think it's the completely unexpected sightings that are truly messages from her. The ones that throw me off a little, you know? Like that purple car I saw on Georgia Street, the one called a Spyder.

That's my mom. That's love.