Marion pulled the bed frame from the wall so that she could disassemble it. Trash fell to the floor and a dusty line of demarcation was revealed on the wall. She picked up the crumpled receipts and juice box straws from the floor and placed them in the maw of the black plastic trash bag. She peeled off something that remained stuck to the wall. It was a square of brown and white wax paper printed with a familiar logo. She choked back a tear.
Gavin had simple tastes. He didn’t care for hard candy, disliking the way it rattled against his teeth. He didn’t like bars of chocolate, whether by themselves or mixed with any variety of fruits, nuts or caramel. He loved Tootsie rolls. Not Tootsie Pops nor the panoply of flavors that the manufacturer eventually developed, but the original. On cold days, he liked to hold one in his hand or in his pocket until it became warm enough to be soft and pliable when it entered his mouth.
The first Halloween after Gavin died, Marion couldn’t enter any store that sold candy without collapsing. She saw the big bags bursting with Tootsie Rolls and mothers admonishing their children with angry eyes and collapsed on herself. She didn’t even have the energy to cry. It wasn’t grief. Grief is something palpable. It was pure absence. Not just her son’s. A part of herself was no longer there.
After two years of scarcely being able to open the door, Marion was clearing out Gavin’s bedroom to turn it into an office space. She used to write back in college. Her therapist, over the course of the four sessions that Marion’s health insurance was willing to pay for, had suggested that it might be an effective tool in helping her to process her trauma. She had joined an online writer’s group, but simply lurked without commenting. Active members posted about writing morning pages, a diary-like exercise written by hand every morning which cleared the mind so that stories might emerge from the incessant chatter. When she tried it, however, she found nothing behind the endless lists of chores. She didn’t have anything to say or anyone to say it to.
Her story was one that would be better written with an eraser than a pen. She thought Gavin had the flu, but wasn’t concerned with the headache and nausea since he’d had his vaccination. Twenty-four hours later he was gone. The last thing she’d said to him was “No school for you tomorrow, mister,” before he went to sleep. That much was true. Viral meningitis, the doctors had said.
Marion looked down at her notebook. She had written her son’s name over and over again without the intervention of her consciousness. “Dear God,” she thought. Then her hand began weaving the rope that she would use to pull herself back from the abyss.
“Dear Gavin,” the letter began, “You have no idea how much I miss you.”
Literature in Small Doses 