“If you die, arnaud, I will not survive you

Open letter to my son

“If you die, Arnaud, I will not survive you”.
From where you are, tell me, do you remember those words?
I said them many times as I felt your hand let go of mine. When I took full force of the immensity of your suffering and I ran out of arguments. Breathless.
To evoke my own death, to brandish it loud and clear like a promise, in the hope of causing the electroshock that would make you want to stay alive. It is all that I had found to prevent the passage to the act, and to escape, for a time, from the grip of your demons which little by little, annihilated your dreams and hopes of cure.

“If you die, Arnaud, I will not survive you”. These words pronounced like a mantra supposed to ward off fate. A magic formula that would erect a wall around us as high as the sky, whose impassable walls would keep death at bay. I believed it, you know. So strong. I imagined the scene. I saw the pictures.
Despair, sometimes, leads to rubbing shoulders with the irrational.

And then one morning there was a call from your father. And the explosion caused by this sentence which still resonates in the hollow of my being: “It’s over”.
So I felt the earth give way under my feet. In a split second, the shock of the news knocked me to the ground. One minute, one hour. Maybe more. I do not know.
I came to my senses in another body, that of the amputated mother of a son, out of this world, out of time, exiled forever in a place from which we do not return, forever cut off from those who ignore what it says, what it does, the loss of a child.
Very quickly, we had to face the eulogies. And endure the indelicacies full of good feelings that relatives or not inflict on those who are going through this tragedy. There were also those few strangers out of nowhere who threw themselves into my arms, their eyes filled with tears in the hope of finding comfort. You see, my son, this so particular mourning sometimes means that the roles are reversed. The bereaved become those who console. I tell myself that if it wasn’t just unbearable, we could almost smile about it.

And then time passed, those close to the “world before” moved away. My phone, desperately silent. As if misfortune were a contagious disease. In the end, so much the better. It’s sorting out. I didn’t have to shake my paper diary very hard for most of my contacts to get loose and end up in the dustbin. This is how. Now, I choose those who enter my “new world”, they are no longer the ones who choose me.

To join you. Yes, I thought about it. Often. But each time, I changed my mind.
And yet, there are stories that leave us inconsolable. Impossible mourning in which words no longer have their place. You will notice that there is no word in the French language, nor in most other languages ​​for that matter, to describe someone who loses a child. Do not name the drama to leave the unthinkable outside the world, there must be something like that. So, with those like me who were struck by the death of a child, we called ourselves “Paranges”. Parents of an angel. It’s pretty, don’t you think?

People often talk to me about resilience. If you only knew, my son, how much I hate this word used in all sorts of ways, and the metaphors that accompany it! No, I don’t want to turn my scars into stars, nor to work, over time, to grow poppies on scorched earth! No really not ! My pain is so deep, that it is anchored in me, and does not suffer from any form of resilience. I am her, and she is me. Inseparable from each other.

As someone before me said: “We don’t grieve, it’s mourning that makes us. “
It’s so fair!
“If you die, Arnaud, I will not survive you”. You see, my son, you are no longer there. I do. I stayed. I hope you don’t blame me. It was one day, not so long ago, reading these words from François Cheng, that everything was illuminated. Listen: “What the dead leave to the living is certainly inconsolable sorrow, but also an additional duty to live, to fulfill the part of life from which the dead apparently had to part, but which remains intact. “
In this text, I found my reason for living. Of course there is your brother, and the few lives that still depend on me. But there is also and above all this pressing need to highlight your twenty years of earthly existence. Talking about yourself, saying your first name, telling about the boy you were, is to give you a little life.

I understood, Arnaud that life and death hold hands. Whether I like it or not, that’s how it is. Today, it is with a smile that I recall your memory. Because I do not want the tragedy of your disappearance to overshadow your history, and this wonderful son that you were, and that you will always remain.

Your mom forever.

Barbara ejenguele

A journalism student, Barbara is currently doing a work-study master’s degree and writes on parenthood for the Aufeminin Maman, Parole de Mamans and Avis de Mamans websites. She is also …