Cathy
A short story on death, forgiveness, and letting go.
Mom’s friends are always right. Dr. Jack was no exception. When Cathy was dying, he had offhandedly offered another one of his “gems of wisdom.”
“When we die, our entire life flashes by in our mind,” he had matter-of-factly said.
Everyone else was too preoccupied to indulge him, and I was no exception.
“How can a man remain so objective even when his niece is on her deathbed?” I had wondered to myself.
That said, though, this little piece of information stuck with me. And today, as I lie on this hospital bed beside an ominous-looking monitor with an ebbing red line, his words come back to haunt me as my mind momentarily flashes back to my childhood, and I brace myself as I relive those moments once again.
How long can a flashback of life’s entire events last for a seventeen-year-old?
I patiently wait for the red line to steady itself, but my thoughts are interrupted as a still from my childhood engulfs the insides of my eyelids.
An oak tree greets me.
It is a gloomy day, and in the background, the clouds are already moving in. I hear laughter from behind me, and I poke my head around the tyre swing on which I am sitting to see a pale-skinned girl running towards me with her two pigtails flying in the air behind her, bobbing up and down as if waving to me with equal enthusiasm.
Cathy comes to a stop beside me and plops down on the grass. She is heaving heavily. “Mama’s calling you inside,” she says when she manages to catch her breath. “She said it will rain, soon and that she doesn’t want you getting wet, again. Last time, you ruined her new carpet.”
Typical Cathy.
“Fine. But, how about one last swing?” I look at her with pleading eyes.
The memory flashes forward. The tyre’s wet. It is drizzling lightly.
As I give Cathy a push, I see my aunt, Cathy’s mother, making her way towards us. I start forward to bring the tyre to a stop. Cathy’s standing on the tyre, at the top, mid-swing, with the tyre about to make its journey back down when she sees me.
“No! Don’t stop me. Just this one. Then, I promise I’ll let you — .”
As my eyes flick back and forth from my aunt’s face to Cathy’s pleading one, back to the terror that seems to have suddenly overcome my aunt, I glance up at Cathy. She’s not there.
And I hear laughter, again.
This still keeps replaying in my head. I feel myself want to let go. How I yearn the red line to come to a stop — to save me from this torture.
Wasn’t this the reason why I had willed myself into my current situation? Why wouldn’t the memory allow me to finally be at peace? Wasn’t the self-punishment enough of a redemption?
Laughter, again.
Is that water on my face? I bring my hand up to my face. Wait! Why aren’t the tubes holding me back? I open my eyes. I am no longer in the hospital bed. The monitor with the red line is gone.
Laughter, again.
I look up. A drop of water falls into my eye and momentarily blinds me. I cower away, blinking rapidly.
“And I thought I was the scaredy-cat!” Cathy’s voice makes its way to my ears. There she is. Standing tall, balanced with her two feet firmly on the tyre.
“C’mon! Give me a push.”
And, once again, I find myself saying yes.
Cathy offers me an angelic smile, and it hits me that maybe, this was the moment for which we both had been waiting. And as we rise up, hand-in-hand, content, it finally dawns on me that I will not have to see that ominous monitor, again.
The red line has finally drawn itself into a straight one, for it was Cathy who taught me that it is self-forgiveness, not self-punishment that redeems.
Note: I wrote this piece in January 2017 for a picture-based writing prompt for which we had a time limit of 1–1.5 hours. The image depicted a cloudy sky, with a house in the background and a tree with a tire swing tied with a rope on two ends of a branch, in the foreground. I have edited a few things from the original piece before publishing it here on Medium.
