Never Alone

Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen

"What was wrong with your mom?" Damien asked Shima. The group went silent as his question hovered in the air. "Sorry," he said, once he realized we were all looking at him. "I'm not great with people. Sometimes I ask questions that others know not to. You don't have to answer." He looked away from us in embarrassment.

Shima smiled sympathetically at him. "It's okay. She had ovarian cancer. She used to laugh and talk to me like she was fine. I had a really hard time with that when she died. I thought there should have been some sign that she was done fighting. She wouldn't let the doctors try to cure her." Shima looked away, out the window, but not really focusing on anything. "I was just fooled. My mother painted a picture for me and I only saw what she wanted me to."

"Would it have been better to know how much she was suffering?" Dr. Crimm asked.

Shima shrugged. Tears fell down over her soft cheeks. She shook her head. "I wanted to know everything about my mother. I feel like I missed something important. It would have been different if I'd known how badly she was feeling."

"Do you think maybe she had a reason for not sharing with you?"

"She didn't want me to worry. She wanted to protect me. I know all of that logically, but it feels like she lied. It took this immense trust I used to feel for her and shattered it."

"Maybe she didn't want the time she had left with you to be about the cancer," Marco said from his chair opposite hers. "If I had time left with my dad, I'd want it to be positive. I wouldn't want to be thinking about the ugly stuff or wallowing in the pain. I'd want to go shooting with him, or maybe go for a run on the high-school track."

Shima watched him carefully. "I get that. I can see why she did it. I just wish she hadn't. She thought she was protecting me, but her pain would have made her death more like descending a staircase than jumping off a cliff. I thought my mom wanted to be here. I guess she did—but there was also a con. Every pro I could have listed for her being alive would have paled in comparison to the pain. I could have understood that. I could have let her go instead of trying so hard to hold her here."

The group was silent again. The idea that any child would be okay with losing a parent was hard to swallow. Marco and Shima both would have done things differently if they had known what they did now. Only, that was always the case, wasn't it? We didn't get to go back and change the way things were or gather information from all perspectives before experiencing the things in life that ripped our hearts out. Seeing things from all angles had to come slowly with time, wisdom, and experience. This group, however, was going to get that experience in just one week.

"I don't know what everyone here believes about spirits or the afterlife, but I believe that when I cut myself, my mother kept me alive long enough for my dad to find me," Shima said, her voice tight with emotion. "I feel terrible that I still wish she hadn't. I want to go with her. I want to rest my head on her lap again and feel her hands in my hair. I don't want to be here. I can't be here."

We looked around the group at one another. Talk like that would buy you an extended stay at the psychiatric hospital. Dr. Crimm nodded. "It will be a choice every day. You will have to wake up and decide if you are strong enough to be here. Grief may lessen with time, but you'll never experience that if you choose to leave. I respect that choice, but I want you to know that you won't just be making that decision for you—you will be making it for everyone whose life touches yours. What will your death do to your father? What will it do for the kids who talk to you at school? Suicide is a selfish decision, but I understand that choosing to live is sometimes beyond what you think you are capable of."

"Suicide is in my blood," Shima said. "It's like a study of my family tree would reveal not just relatives but branches with nailed-on suicide notes and tangled-up nooses." Her eyes lifted to Dr. Crimm's. "There's no one left. It's just my father and me now, and he would be better off without me," she said softly. "I'm just something else he has to stay here for. His way of healing is to drink. If I'm here I get in the way of that. He can't even self-medicate out of obligation to me. If I'm gone, he can go back home to Japan and finally be where he believes the souls of our ancestors are."