The keeper
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It started with a glass jar and two rocks. The first rock was collected by my mother on a trip she took to New Zealand just after Anja died. The second rock I picked up on the first day I noticed myself feeling something like happiness – the saddest kind of happiness, but still, the first glimmer of it. Easter weekend, a hike in Lynn Canyon with R and E. We walked up and down the canyon, the giant, mossy, magical red cedars and Douglas Fir trees towering over us. It was early in the day, the sunlight filtering down onto the gnarled roots across our path, the snowpack runoff river roaring alongside. I wished her there, and stooped low to pick up a rock. I knew I would take it home and put it with my mother’s rock from the Tasman Sea. I had the idea that I could collect more rocks, rocks from other magical places she wouldn’t get to see, places where I would feel her absence and dream her back to us.
At home, I put the two rocks into the bottom of a tall, empty vase. Not a special vase, just one of the many vases that came with condolence flowers after she died. It became a habit – pick up a rock or shell in all the places we go and think of her. Rocks from the beach a block away, rocks from the other side of the country on our yearly trips to the beaches of P.E.I. and the Bay of Fundy. I’ve collected shells, pebbles, buttons, marbles in Puerto Vallarta, New York City, Liverpool, Philadelphia, Winnipeg. One of the latest additions: a small, perfectly round cypress cone pocketed in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens last October. When I arrived home – after a 23-hour trip but only two hours later than I’d left Australia – there was no room left in the vase. There hadn’t been for a few months, and I set the cypress cone down on the shelf next to a flat red rock from Dorchester Cape, New Brunswick and a heart-shaped stone picked up on the way to school one morning. After eight years, the vase is full. Layer upon layer of small treasures brought back for her; layer upon layer of our wishes and dreams and longing. There are rocks that E’s sweet little three-year-old hands clutched all the way home from forest walks and beach forages, and rocks that her brother learned to collect, too. ‘A rock for the Anja jar, Mama,’ he says on New Year’s Day at Spanish Banks, ‘and this, too,’ he adds, spreading his fingers wide to show a tiny, perfect pink shell, whole, in the palm of his own small, perfect hand. We take them home and place them carefully on the shelf beside the vase.
I think about all the other things I collect. I could write post after post after post. Documentary traces, gathered in desperation in those early days, as proof she’d really existed: ultrasound photos, bus tickets, a list of potential names. The hospital memory box, and in it a tiny pink crocheted blanket, a saccharine poem, her footprints, the hat she’d worn in the hospital. The footprints and hat, stained with blood and mucous, physical traces of her tiny, gorgeous body.
The newborn diaper R. slipped into his pocket on his way out of the hospital room, never needed. A single pink and white striped onesie. Her photos. Just three. A series of Christmas ornaments, one each year for our winter girl.
All of these things. Oh, my dear girl. All of these things: they’re a piss poor substitute for you, that’s for damn sure, but they’re what I have.
I’m an archivist, by trade. A keeper, as the English say. I’m the keeper of her memory, the curator of all these objects I accumulate, invest with significance, arrange just so.
It’s late afternoon, Mother’s Day 2020, my ninth Mother’s Day without Anja. We walk across campus, keeping 2 metres distance between us and other families, this strange new normal we’ve already learned to accept. The children stop to climb a tree. I stoop down. A smooth round pebble nestled in a patch of bulbous brown mushrooms has caught my eye. I pick it up, rub it clean, pocket it. A keeper.