ONE
MASON
“The loss of a child is the greatest suffering that can be visited upon a human soul. It’s the cruelest pain a person can ever know. Millie was a bright star upon this earth. She brought warmth and love into the lives of all those she met. Throughout Millie’s short life, she suffered a great deal, but she always wore a smile upon her face. She was a comet, streaking across the sky, brilliant and perfect. A wonder we are blessed to have witnessed with our own eyes before she vanished from the face of this earth. With the deepest fondness and sorrow, we remember her today as a child of laughter and playfulness. A young girl who never allowed anger into her heart, despite the trials and tribulations that were cast upon her shoulders. Millie’s brother, Mason, who cared for Millie alone for the majority of her life—”
The church smells like freesias. I don’t know shit about flowers. I just picked out the ones that reminded me of Millie—small, fragile, pale blooms, so delicate, so small. On the cards I had printed up for the funeral, I asked people to donate money to the hospital instead of bringing wreaths and arrangements, so I don’t know where the sea of freesias that hang from the pews and the columns have come from, but they truly are beautiful. After the casket and the funeral home’s fees, I had about two hundred bucks left to buy an arrangement for the top of Millie’s tiny coffin. The florist sent a couple of extra bunches to have in vases on either side of the cedar box my little sister is lying inside of at the front of the church. That was nice of her. I know she didn’t charge me for them. As the priest continues on, his voice soft, lilting, and melancholy, filling the cavernous space inside the church, I glance around at the cascading waves of flowers hanging from the backs of the seats in front of me. The white petals are scattered like snow all over the floor. The lectern is covered in them, from the raised wooden stand to its base. The thick marble plinth that Millie’s coffin sits on is choked with white ribbons and freesias, baby’s breath and roses. There must be thousands of dollars’ worth of flowers crammed inside the church right now. Tens of thousands of dollars’ worth.
I slide my finger down the collar of my shirt, tugging at it, trying to loosen the damn thing. I can’t fucking breathe. The priest is still talking, but his words flow over me like water flowing over a riverbed of stones.
I am numb.
The church is almost full to capacity. A couple of hundred people sit quietly in the pews, dabbing at tears that seem to come so easily to them but which stubbornly refuse to visit me at all. The parents of Millie’s school friends. The residents in my building. People my parents knew, people who I haven’t seen or heard from in years. So many broken people, all gathered under the roof of Saint Jude’s church to say good bye to Millie. Where the fuck were they when I was carrying my sister from her bed to the bathroom in the middle of the night, when she was soaked in her own urine and sobbing under her breath, frightened and scared, clinging onto me as though her life depended on it? They’re putting on a good show of being broken-hearted right now, like Millie mattered so much to them, but none of these fuckers ever went out of their way to try and help her or make sure she was okay.
“The Lord has called Millie home to him. She now sits by his right hand, free from the pain and ill health she suffered during this lifetime.” The priest keeps on talking. He asked me to sit on the front pew, at the very front of the church, but fuck that. The idea of a crowd of people all lining up one by one so they can shake my hand and hug me, tell me how sorry they are for my loss, their shining tears streaking down their faces, their noses running like taps…the entire idea of it was paralyzing. I sit and I stare at the box.
It’s so fucking tiny.
“Mason? Mason, it’s time.”
I look up, blinking, my brain foggy and crowded with too many thoughts, and the priest’s staring at me, his owlish brown eyes shining brightly behind the polished lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses. I get to my feet, using the back of the pew in front of me to steady myself; my legs feel wobbly, like they might give out from underneath me any second now. I have a crumpled piece of paper in my right hand. As I walk slowly down the aisle toward the front of the church, I try to flatten it out. It’s a pointless task, though. I’ve been squeezing it tightly since I sat now and now the piece of paper is ruined.
My throat feels so fucking tight when I take the priest’s spot behind his lectern. Staring down at the destroyed, misshapen piece of paper, I stand very still and consider my options for a moment. I’ve never had to do anything this hard. Burying my parents was tough, but it didn’t feel like this. Millie was my reason for surviving every day. Making sure she was warm and well fed, that she had clean clothes on her back, that her hair was brushed and she was generally healthy were the only things I cared about on a daily basis. Now that she’s gone…
“I used to—” My voice breaks. The microphone on the lectern hums with feedback. Fuck. I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself before I talk again.
…six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven….
“I used to give my parents shit for making me look after Millie when they wanted to go out,” I say. My eyes are on my hands, which are laid flat against the lectern, fingers splayed wide, as if I’m trying to hold myself upright with the stand. “I was a young kid. I wanted to go hang with my friends. I’d just learned to drive, so I wanted to burn around Seattle with my boys, impressing girls from school. I liked to drink and smoke. Other…worse things.” I give the priest a sideways glance, but he doesn’t look shocked in the slightest. Clearing my throat, I risk raising my eyes to look into the faces of all the people sitting in somber lines before me. “I resented the fact that they’d had a kid so long after they’d had me. She was annoying. She needed constant attention. She was always stuck to me like glue. Would never leave me alone. She would look at me with this…just…complete adoration. It freaked me out.
“And then, one day, my parents were out and she got sick. I was trying to play Xbox and she kept telling me her head felt funny, but I ignored her. Not long after that, she was lying on the ground and she was shaking. Her back was bent, her hands balled up, her knuckles white. Her teeth were clenched together, her eyes jittering from side-to-side, her lips going blue. I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do, so I scooped her up and I put her in my car, and I drove her to the hospital. Eighteen hours later, after CAT scans we didn’t have insurance to cover and a thousand other tests that freaked Millie out, they came back and told me the news. They told me the news because my parents still hadn’t come home and neither of them were answering their cell phones, so I was the next best thing. They said epilepsy. Not just epilepsy, though. Something complicated and life-threatening that I didn’t understand. They gave me comped meds, a bunch of paperwork, and let me take Millie home. I remember being so fucking relieved…” I laugh, my voice broken again, high and choked with emotion. “I remember thinking, “thank fuck that’s over. I’ll take her home and Mom and Dad can take the reins from here. I can go out and party, get high and forget this shitty night ever happened.”
“So I go home, but they’re not there. They don’t come home for three days, and then when they did show up and I told them what happened, they brushed it off like it was nothing. Millie was okay by then. She seemed normal, so the frightening information on the sheets and sheets of paper that I handed to them seemed totally unnecessary. Even when they did see Millie have seizure, they didn’t take it seriously. Six months later, both of them were dead, and then it was just me and her.
“At first, I was convinced I wasn’t going to be able to cope. I thought I was going to have to hand her over to the state. It wasn’t resentment that I couldn’t go get high or drive around with my friends anymore, though I certainly did feel that way. It wasn’t the worry or the intense panic that I was going to fuck up so badly that I ruined her life somehow, though I thought about that a lot, too. It was the seizures. They started coming faster, progressively getting worse and worse, no matter how many meds or therapeutic treatment courses they put her on. I would sit on the broken tiles in my bathroom with her afterwards, chewing my fingernails off, this seething, dark anger inside of me, taking hold of me…because I knew it. I knew it deep in my bones. I knew this day would come, and I would have to stand here, saying this to you all.”
I take in a breath, trying to stretch out my lungs, to push aside the terrible burning sensation in the back of my throat. There are women crying in the front row. Women crying in all the rows. Men crying, too.
“At some point, that knowledge became something I accepted, though. I stopped thinking about passing her off to be dealt with by someone else. She became more than my sister. She became my responsibility. My sole reason for getting out bed in the morning. She was so young. She was just a kid. She wanted to play and sing and dance, so I gave her as many opportunities to do that as I could. I held her hand when she needed me to. I held her body when it was bruised and broken. I held her close, and I held her tight, and she felt safe despite the illness that was tearing her apart from the inside.
“And now she is gone.” I stare at the tiny coffin for a moment, unable to speak. A heavy, suffocating blanket of hurt hangs over the church; it seems as though even the limestone statues of the saints are holding their breath. Eventually I look away from Millie, closing my eyes. You could hear a pin drop. “I am twenty-six years old,” I whisper. “I am twenty-six years old, and I’ve carried more hurt and suffering on my back than anyone should. Millie carried more, though. She carried it with a light heart, and she never complained. And now that she’s gone, I’m done. I’m done with everything. I’m done with trying so hard to live up to expectations. I’m done trying to hold up the goddamn sky. I’m done trying to be good. To always do the right thing. I mean, where did it get me? I did everything right and she still died. I still couldn’t help her in the end. So fuck it. That’s it.” I open my eyes, scanning the shocked, tear-stained faces that are staring back at me. “And most importantly, I am done with you fuckers.”
I step down from the lectern. I walk past Millie’s coffin, my heart tearing in two as I leave her behind. I walk rigidly down the aisle, toward the exit that seems so far away, and all I can concentrate on is putting one foot in front of the other.
This is what the end of the world feels like.