I haven't been able to write anything about this for more than month and I don't want to use this space for my personal emotional discharge.
But I feel this might be relevant to my work at some point. I don't know yet in what way or form.
My dear aunt passed away last month. She was diagnosed with liver cancer three days before. Doctors had predicted at least a few weeks, but she left in a day. While I write this I feel like I'm writing fiction, there is a lot still left to process.
I was in her apartment a few days after her death. Her smell was there, her clothes, the leftovers that she cooked the day before on the stove. While emptying the fridge I burst into tears at the look of the fresh vegetables she bought at the market just a couple of days earlier.
How is it that a person is and in just a second, is not?
After death we may not be seen or heard, but we remain very present through the other senses.
My mum and I went to her place to take away most of her things so that my uncle wouldn't have to deal with the heavy presence of her absence. He asked us to do so.
We gathered a collection of large and tiny beauty products from the bathroom. I remembered her standing in that very spot the same morning she died. She couldn't stand on her own and her mind was already travelling far away from there, but, in a moment of lucidity, she asked me to help her put on lipstick on her because she wanted to be presentable for the doctor.
After the bathroom, ,I moved to clear out her nightstand, there was a pot of hand cream that I gave her for Christmas.
That night, as I was going to bed after one of the saddest days in my life, I took the pot and opened it. I smelt it and observed it for a long time. Carved in the cream, there were the trails of my aunt's fingers. It looked like a sculpture. The physicality of absence.
I was split in a dilemma. It was a sculpture, yes, but the cream would vanish and with time, as the physical body of my aunt.
Should I use the cream? And destroy the last mark of my aunt? Should I leave it untouched like a relic? creepy. Should I throw it out? Never. I wanted to remember this moment and feeling, vividly. I took a picture of it.
Finally, I moved. I slowly slid my fingers through the trails, like a caress. Seen from outside, the scene must be a mix between creepy and ridiculous. But It was a deeply emotional moment for me, an invisible touch. It felt like perceiving her for one last time, saying goodbye in a much more intimate, sincere way that her own funeral.
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