Sophia's Garden, Page 2

to other peoples’ actions. I needed to be like them, to feel, to assert. There were days things didn’t go as planned and at first it would make me furious but then I would watch Sophia, calm, talking to God, trusting him, and I would begin to cry in shame realizing I had no real control in this life. I began to relax, not to the passive old me, but someone better to roll with the punches of everyday life when life was completely unpredictable.

  My husband still tried to get out to the island on a regular, meaning two to three times a week, basis but as time wore on his work seemed to consume him. There were staff meetings, surgeries, commitments I felt he needed to attend to keep his sanity. In the beginning I believed him, encouraged him even, but soon I knew it wasn’t a ‘what’ that kept him away but a ‘whom’. When he did come to the island he spent most of his time with Sophia, which gave me an unjustified twinge of jealousy, but I pacified myself with the knowledge he would lay in our bed that night and be the prince to my princess. He was always tender and loving when he came to me but something was gone. The way he looked at me was different, almost distant. I couldn’t tell if he was distancing me to protect me, or himself. I tried not to notice, tried to make love to him the way we had before, our souls completely wrapped around each other as he consumed my every sense. Afterwards he would hold me tight and sometimes I could feel the tears he tried to hide roll down his cheek and wet my head. Mine were easy to hide as they slid silently to the pillow captured forever in its downy tomb.

  Sophia and I made the trek into the mainland once a week for her treatment. She was always ravenous afterwards and hopped up on the steroids they gave her before the medicine so we ate and shopped gleefully for the rest of the day before taking the boat back to our seclusion. Travis was always with her during treatment. Sometimes he would sit with her, on a roll-about stool, holding her hand and sometimes they would put up a table and play cribbage. She had made friends with many of the patients who came for treatment on the same day, talked or emailed them when she couldn’t see them. They had become the circle of friends she kept in contact with now as the only one from her old life she clung to was Travis, her Romeo. It saddened me, but also made me proud, the way she loved these new friends. She knew some of them, possibly herself, were going to die no matter how much science they absorbed through their veins. It was in God’s hands. Oh, how I had raged against that when she had first told me. How can you say that! I had screamed. I always thought I was spiritual, I believed in God, but after I cooled down I realized what I knew of God and his wisdom was Sunday school teachings. I knew nothing, believed in nothing, and worse, trusted nothing.

  Little by little I could understand Sophia’s peace. Oh, there were times I watched her in the garden from the kitchen window having a conversation with God and I could tell she was still fighting as she ranted, fists and head raised high, that she wasn’t going to go without an all out brawl. I could almost see the pride in God’s smile as the sun shone down on his wondrous, glorious child. That was what he wanted. Not blind devotion without any spirit. He wanted shuspah! He wanted moxy, he wanted her to live while she lived, with him as her guide, not her sentencer or jailer. It was at one time like this I found myself, hands braced on the kitchen counter, bawling like I had needed to, but had denied myself for so long, asking God, the real God my daughter knew, to come into my life.

  Travis and I scattered Sophia’s ashes in the garden she lovingly nurtured on the island where we had lived for the last year. A lot had happened and I sighed deeply, but it was a sigh of not only healing and closure but the release of pain. Sophia’s and mine. I put my hand in the urn that held my daughter, felt the sootiness out of balance with the larger pieces of bone, and gently scattered her essence over the flowers I had kept up when she had been too sick to work them. She would sit in her wheelchair at the edge of the garden watching me and listening to the seagulls caw. I had grown to like their sound, had found comfort in it and even found myself smiling as Sophia ripped, then lobbed, pieces of bread for them to eat. I watched as the gentle Atlantic breeze picked up the lighter dust and scattered it for me. A gentle hand on my shoulder made me turn, a smile on my face that had, for the last few months, been frozen in pain and anger. Sophia’s Romeo put his hands out and I handed him the urn. At first I could tell he was forcing himself to do something that made him sick, the thought of touching his dead girlfriend in such a way, but whether it was my smile or the reassuring hand I laid over his that changed his attitude, I will never know. He took a steadying breath, dug his hand in a little deeper and came out with a handful of ash and bone which he scattered as he’d seen me do. We took turns until there was only dust in the bottom. I let him turn it upside down and we watched the wind carry the last of my daughter away. I also allowed that wind to take things from me I had held on to for many months. Anger, hurt, betrayal. Take it all way, gentle wind, I don’t want it anymore. God smiled as he blew the ashes from the urn Travis held, hearing my pleas, answering my prayers. I took Travis’s hand and, with a last glance at the house that had been my home for the last year, stepped onto the boat that would take us to new, separate, chapters of our lives.

  Betrayal. Yes, I had been betrayed. My prince had been finding solace in the arms of my best friend Cassie, a few nurses and more than a few call girls. We each deal with stress differently and he chose to screw his away, just not with me.

  I divorced my prince, sold the house in the suburbs and found a small cottage by the sea with land around me for privacy, my flower garden, the sound of the sea gulls, and for my thoughts that sometimes loomed so large I feared there wasn’t enough space for them to go. Travis applied to medical school and would be leaving in the fall but has promised to keep in touch. I believe him. He truly loved my daughter and she would always be with him, who she was, her will to live and her grace in dying has shaped him in ways only time will show.

  Losing Sophia left an emptiness inside me that will never be filled but around that emptiness is the love of God and the knowledge that everything happens for a reason. Oh how I cling to that belief with all my heart and soul! Right now it is hard to see why my most precious love had to leave me, us, but having watched Sophia have so much faith and grace at the feet of her Father, I cannot believe her death held no meaning. Something good will come of her passing, of that I am certain.

  I still get angry, raging around the house with my fists clenched, raised high into the air cursing God. He watches me, lets me rant, but I can see him trying to hide his pain brought on by my pain. He knows what his children go through is hard, we are imperfect creatures that bad things happen to those who least deserve it, but he has no control. All he can do is love us, take us into his fold and comfort us in our time of need. Slowly the anger leaves me feeling deflated but not empty as I pull myself off the floor, take a deep breath and find my grace to work in Sophia’s garden another day.

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