Amplification

So . . . end of August. Here you are again. Pulling at the edges of my heart. With your talk of endings, summers and pregnancies, with your small gentle hands. Baby's hands. Not the kind with dimpled knuckles though.

Summer is fading. It's very close today. Humid and sticky.

We have had a typical end of summer weekend.

On Saturday we went to Frensham Ponds. A tiny inland sea, Frensham Great Pond. Packed with boats and screaming children. Surrounded by sand heated up to nearly unbearable temperatures. Everybody, ever, appears to be there. Balanced on towels spread out on the sand. Eating ice-cream.

Today, we went to a pick-your-own fruit farm and picked blackberries and blueberries. Too late for the more conventional strawberry and too early and too late, both at once, for raspberries.

I find the physical sensations associated with these trips overwhelming.

The hot sand, gritty on the soles of my feet.
The cool, cool water of the pond, dappled with sunlight.

I take Reuben to the pond. His soft, fat feet walking across the sand next to my adult bony ones. Which look like a horrible caricature contrasted against the perfection of his one year old version of the same.

His cautious first dip in the water. Gently easing one toe into the shallow channel. Then, with a crow of delight, we plunge in and he is pulling me by the hand. Babbling excitedly in that language that is not yet language but does not preclude understanding. Fun, fun, curiosity, joining-in-with, come, come, come and see.

I look at Jessica's mouth, smudged with blackberries. "Look mummy, SO juicy," she gloats. I offer to carry her hoard of blackberries and she eyes me suspiciously. "NO, I will carry them," she says, brooking no arguments and clutching them close to her chest.

And I feel these things, the sand, the water, the blackberries in my mouth. And I seem to feel them more than once. More than I did before the twins were born. Before August 2008.

Because, although I cannot know what my children feel, what my children think, what my children know, I can imagine. I am lost in the imagining of it. Sometimes they seem to be conspiring with me, as they look me right in the eye and beam. Look at this, look at me, look at me. The cries oft repeated by young children. Witness me, imagine me. I'm here, I'm here and I'm being. Look, look.

When the hot grains of sand burn my feet, I feel them over again. Enlarged, hotter. Against a smoother foot, without callosities.

The water seems cooler, thinner. As Reuben smiles up into my face, the sensation undergoes a peculiar doubling. The joy, another joy.

The tart blackberry in my mouth, turned up by Jessica's purple stained smile. Amplified.

To very nearly unbearable.

To such a pitch of joy and such an awful sorrow.

I am so very grateful that they know what these things feel like, that they have experienced, as far as I can know, something similar to things that I myself have experienced. That we share these things, that smile, the looking into one another's eyes as we do something particularly fun.

But one of my children will only know a hospital and pain and a desperate kind of trying. A protracted death. Which I could only observe. No sand, no pond, no blackberries. And I'm so very grieved by that and I can make no sense of it.

I know this. I've known it for a long, long time.

And I've wondered, over the years, whether she is lucky. Luckier than all of us. In a place where sand and water and blackberries might not even exist. Or they might. How would I know after all.

So far removed from all of this, these bags of meat and chemicals and bone, that flicker and experience and collapse.

But today, I'm just so sad. That I can't really share any experiences with Georgina. Apart from holding her in my arms as she died. And sometimes I wonder if I were merely an annoyance to her. With my anxious hovering and protestations of love.

And I wish I could gift her with something. With hot sand against her feet or cool water on her skin or a blackberry pressed against her lips. Anything. Anything from the world that I know. To bind us together.