Chapter 4

Pre-note: I personally like this section, let me know what you think :)

Chapter four, section one:

I never thought I could really miss my family, but the weeks that followed my death would be consumed with thoughts of them.

The memory of my life didn’t come back all at once. The day it started was when I saw the hospital window, and after that, slowly I remembered. Little things would jog my mind, enticing me with snippets of pictures that didn’t make sense at first.

The first thing that started to come back to me was my family, because they’d been there for me my whole life. Back when I was alive, I used to think of all the amazing universities on the other side of the country I could go to as soon as I graduated, moving far away from my crazy family. Sharing a cramped room with another student in a residence sounded amazing compared to living at home. Who wants to live with their parents when they’re a teenager? Now factor in that my parents were divorced, half my mother’s family wouldn’t speak the other, my siblings drove me crazy every day, and you would be out the door, too. 

That was before they were gone, however.

First, it was my mother. My mother was in most of my fuzzy, first memories. She had the long, golden hair that I’d inherited and the same oval face, but eyes a deeper blue than mine. My mother’s eyes had reflected everything she thought; they would tell me if I could ask her to stay out past midnight or if she was having a relapse into the “off days” that came after the divorce.

When I stood on the beach in Heaven for the first time, it was memories of her that came back to me. We used to spend the summers at my grandmother’s house up just north of us, in beautiful Muskoka, before my mom and my grandma stopped speaking to one another. When I was little, I’d get up early before everyone else and run down to the dock that looked out over the lake. If I was lucky, I’d find the sun rising over it, and watch as the rays slowly filled the shadowed trees and spread sparkles across the lake. When my mother and grandmother found out where I went most mornings, sometimes I’d find them there waiting for me with a quilt and a thermos of hot chocolate. I’d sit in one of their laps, and they’d wrap their quilt and arms around me as I sipped the warm drink. Once, when I was about six, I had come out a little too late, and only my mother was there. The sun was already over the trees on the other side of the lake, but my mother had sat with an empty mug smelling of almond seasoned coffee and watched the sun sparkle over the water. I had tiptoed to the end of the dock and sat down next to her.

“Do you see that?” my mother had said, pointing off into the distance.

“What?” my tiny self had asked. “What is it?”

“My dad used to say that the reflections of the first morning rays of sun over the lake were people in Heaven waving to us.”

“Oh,” I had said, not completely understanding what she’d said or what she was pointing out, but then, sitting on the beach in Heaven, I understood. I understood, and wished that I was one of those dancing rays of light, watching a smile light my mother’s face.

Then came short clips of swimming in the lake all day and of eating sandy sandwiches on the picnic bench with a view of the dock. My grandma was always kind to us; I remember turning to her instead of my mother when one of my siblings and I got into a dispute because she’d always resolve it fairly, typically with cookies and other baked goods.

My dad never came on these trips. He had something against my grandmother and I never found out what it was. He was a quiet man who kept to himself, yet was involved with his own family, which made the coldness he felt towards my grandma confusing to me. But when I was little, I never questioned anything anyway. Since my mother was a stay-at-home mom with three children, I saw less of my dad than I did of my mom, and so he appeared second in my stream of memories.

When I was in kindergarten, my dad had worked just down the street from my school, so he had walked me there each morning. I remember riding on his shoulders sunny mornings, with my small fingers tangled through his thick dark hair. He would bring a tumbler full of coffee, with the same almond flavour my mom liked, and sip it as he told to me not to pull at his head. I would put my hand over one of his eyes, and he would respond with an, “Arr! Don’t do that mate!” in a pirate accent, which would send me into fits of giggles.

This memory came shortly after spending that first day on the beach, when we were walking back to the car and I glanced over my shoulder to see that little white boat way off in the distance, sailing towards the horizon on that mysterious ocean.