Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
My great love is short but mighty. He’s not technically here anymore; he died in 2013 from cancer. Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma also known as DIPG. He was only sick for twelve weeks from the time of diagnosis until he took his last breath. He was five years old.
When you have a great love, it doesn’t matter if you loved for a day, a month or five years. Time has no place where love lives. Love takes up all the oxygen, all the heart and head space and swallows you whole. My son was a special little human. He collected hearts. Considered an ‘old soul’ by many, everybody he met felt connected to him and he attracted more love in his short life than anyone I have ever known. Unfortunately he couldn’t collect my heart. Mine doesn’t work properly anymore. It broke when he left. I’m waiting to give it back to him.
You see, I believe in the soul. I’ve seen it. It’s like stardust. It exited my child’s forehead in a little puff of iridescent blue light as he exhaled his last breath. It was like a Hollywood special effect; I saw something unearthly with my Earthly human eyes. It was this thing that ultimately saved me many times when I felt I couldn’t survive this loss. The feeling that there was more after death was now replaced with just a little knowing. I don’t know what more there is precisely, but I know enough.
From my place beside him where I had dozed off sometime during the last hour of his life, I had suddenly awoken. It seemed like someone had shouted my name or given me a push. I jolted awake and felt deeply that my son wanted and needed to leave his body. We had run out of time. The tumour that started somewhere in the Pons, a part of the brainstem had infiltrated enough of his brain that over the twelve weeks he had lost the ability to talk, walk, feed himself and eventually to breathe. All whilst remaining conscious and having full emotional understanding and awareness of what was happening to him.
I cradled his body in my left arm, face to face with our noses nearly touching. His breathing was like a newborn kitten’s small pants and his eyes were closed but not all the way. I put my right hand to his fragile five year old chest and felt his pounding heart. He had been in what we called his Odin sleep for seven hours; a state of unmovable unconsciousness. I whispered, knowing these were the last words I would say to the perfect human I had created and birthed five years earlier. “Let go”, I said. And he did. He exhaled
Hours upon hours of superhero play had occurred in his room. He didn’t want to leave his room much and preferred only my company. It was a great honour to nurture my fourth and last child to his death. And also my most terrible and greatest sadness. Upon my own death the heart that now beats within my chest, broken but more beautiful by the torment of great love and loss will be handed back to my son. He can mend it like Kintsugi.