Every time Katrina calls for my
attention, I want to think there is a reason. The same scenes often repeat themselves,
sometimes exactly as they were, other times expanded. The hurting keeps being
there, and I feel compelled to do something, but what?
I ask her what she wants, and the answer is: “I want to find his grave, I want to have a place to mourn, I want to know he’s remembered, I just want to cry”. Some of these things I can do, like crying. But others, I just don’t seem to find my way. I have some specific data that came with my memories, but either they are wrong, or I am not looking in the right places, because they never match the records.
And in the meanwhile I keep reliving
these memories as if they were reoccurring nightmares. The day my worst fear
became real is one of them: losing Johann to the war. The day he died, I died with him. My
soul died. My body kept living for a while, but I wasn’t there anymore. As I
have said so many times before, I was paralyzed. I still can see everything: how
I heard his name and dropped whatever I had in my hands, how I ran and fought
to get to him, how I found him already dead on the stretcher, how I was grabbed
and pulled away. I did shout then, and cried. So much that they had to restrain
me and put me a catheter on my jugular vein to administer a sedative.
Everything went black.
And when I woke up, I was dead. The
first thing I did was taking my Virgin medal off and leaving it on the bedside
table, forgotten. I had lost my faith. I realized I was wearing a clear blue
gown and a teardrop fell and wet the cloth. Someone asked me if I wanted
something to eat, I said no. When I regained some of my strength I went to see
the doctor, to ask him if he’d let me see Johann one last time. He did, but I
couldn’t move. Johann’s body was there wrapped in one of those hideous cases to
keep corpses, but I barely could do something, with a nurse at my left and the
doctor at my right, watching that I didn’t go mad again. And I couldn’t touch him, not even hold his hand, not
even whisper some words in his ears.
I couldn’t accept it. It still feels
like a dream today. Only, dreams are not so damn real.
Maybe I can’t find his grave (yet),
but I was getting clear visual impressions of his face. So I used an online
identikit program to try and draw him. The result was impressive. Not
completely accurate, I’d say, but impressive nonetheless.
I died the day he died, with no time
to mourn. Maybe this is the first step to do so.
