P9: "childhood"

I remember the day she died.
I remember the rock hard coldness of her skin when I touched her hand for the last time as they lowered her into the dirt.
It was Thanksgiving that year.

As a kid, I spent a good amount of time collecting the half-decayed carcasses of found bees and lizards around my yard and buried them in the little creature cemetery I'd made to help put them to rest. I made each little sand mound its own twig and grass cross and said little prayers to a God I knew only in my heart. So young and innocent, I didn't yet understand death, but I knew it had significance. It wasn't until she died that I knew what it meant.

It meant growing up too fast. It meant calling an all-out war on malignant cells. It meant losing something I'd never been without.

I remember standing on the deck my dad had just built, and looking at the dry portions of turkey flesh on my disposable plate, trying to find something for which to be thankful. Just beside the deck was the little cemetery, holding mounds of death which suddenly looked more like the goosebumps on my skin than tombs filled with corpses compared to the mound that swallowed my mother.

I wish I could say my days as a gravedigger prepared me for this, but I was in over my head.
For with my mother died my childhood and my innocence. They are buried together.