My sisters and I once had a goldfish
whom we, appropriately, named Bubbles.
We would watch him swim around in his little bowl
Ever circling back and forth and back and forth
Until one morning
Bubbles went belly up.
Now, at the mature age of nine,
Death was the Schroedinger’s monster under my bed
With the potential to destroy everyone I loved,
Accompanied by an uncertain actual existence.
My six year old sister, however,
had not quite yet achieved my understanding of mortality.
A quick family meeting ended
once we came to an apt solution;
The mature, responsible, reasonable thing to do
was, of course,
to cover the bowl with a towel,
tell my sister that Bubbles had a "migraine"
and buy an identical looking goldfish as soon as possible.
I wanted to give Bubbles a proper funeral and a casket
But my mother had already flushed him down the drain by morning.
I once heard that the smallest coffins are the heaviest.
I didn't understand.
I was 8 the morning my grandfather passed in his sleep
For years death smelled like bacon burning
and looked like the pain on my father’s face as he tried not to cry in front of us
How could the tiny casket I wanted for my childhood pet possibly compare?
My grandmother followed when I was 10
Death tasted like the cheap borscht at the reception
And felt like my sobbing mother pulling away from my comforting touch
How could the shoe box my best friend and I buried her hamster in make a dent in that kind of grief?
One morning at school they told us our drama teacher
wouldn't be coming back to class
not tomorrow, not ever
Death felt like the crack in my voice as I sang at his funeral
No, the smallest coffins couldn't possibly be the heaviest, I thought.
Until one morning I heard that a baby fell out of the window of an SUV
Onto cold black concrete and was crushed on impact,
My neighbor’s five year old daughter died of brain cancer,
A sleeping seven year old girl was shot by a police officer in Detroit
A three year old boy froze to death in Etobicoke
Until I sat down on a toilet shocks of pain reverberating through my pelvis
and the unborn child I didn’t know was there slipped out
My father once told me that happiness
is when the grandfather dies
then the father
then the son
Tell us again and again that God must’ve needed another angel
But sympathy falls flat when faced with putting your six year old six feet underground
We all want to believe we were not made like this.
In spite of everything we want to believe there is goodness in the world
That even a force as cruel as death would spare a child.
Now, death sounds like my friends calling me every morning for weeks
to make sure I was still breathing,
Feels like some days being smothered
and others not even crossing my mind,
Realizing that there are some ghosts who won’t disappear with dawn.
They told me it could've fit in the palm of my hand.
Looked like a newborn gerbil chewed up by its mother.
Take my hand.
Walk with me through water waist deep,
steel toed boots on our feet and these small coffins on our backs.
We will never feel anything heavier.