THOSE WHO INSPIRED IT

When I was nine, my school bus would park at the French elementary school around the corner from my house and wait as a whole flock of students boarded and refilled our seats. My drop was only two stops after this, but I still had to wait for the children from the other school before I would be allowed to go home. I was assigned partner with whom I would have to share my seat until we arrived at my stop. This was how I met Monica.

She was one grade below me, with dark, chin length hair and brown eyes. She was always friendly, smiling, and she didn’t seem to mind having to share her seat with me. Often, her younger cousin, who sat in the aisle across from us, would join in our conversations. I can’t remember what we talked about, but I do recall that these girls were always happy. Monica’s brother, who was in grade eight and sat two seats behind us, was loud, mean, and miserable. But I got used to this new group of kids, even if we only rode the bus together for two blocks.

Monica was always one of the first ones on the bus, and she never missed school. So I was surprised one day when the bus began to pull out of the parking lot without her. When I realized her brother was absent as well, I turned to her cousin to ask where they were.

“Oh,” she said. “Their mom has cancer and she’s going to die. Their dad brought them to the hospital so they could say goodbye one last time.”

She said this like it was no big deal, but it was a huge deal to me. I raced home from the bus stop and immediately called my mum at work. I didn’t like making phone calls, but I had to speak with her, to hear her voice and make sense of what was happening to Monica’s mother. To be honest, I don’t think my mm expected me to be in tears because of some girl I hardly knew, but she explained that it was probably something the family had expected for a long time. Sometimes, when people were really sick, it was better for them to die than have to suffer.

After I hung up the phone, I couldn’t stop thinking about how difficult things must have been for Monica. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to know that your mother was going to die, and not be able to do a thing about it. I was sure I would never see Monica again. I spoke to my own friends about it the next day, and we came to the same conclusion: we would never go back to school, never leave our houses again, if anything were to happen to our mothers.

But Monica did come back. Two weeks later, she boarded the bus with a smile on her face, short hair bobbing from side to side as she made her way down the aisle to join me. I was too scared to tell her I knew why she had been away, so instead we talked with her cousin about the new playground equipment at their school. I waited for her to mention her mother, or to suddenly burst into tears. That never happened. She was still happy and kind, and her brother was still rude and obnoxious. Maybe she was a little bit quieter than before, but the world had moved on, and so would she.

Years later, I was working in the kitchen with a TV programme playing in the background. An actress was being interviewed about the time in her childhood when her mother passed away, and her mother’s clothing was boxed up, her photographs removed from the home, and the family ceased to speak of her. There was no counseling for the children back then, no longwinded explanations of why things had changed. Just a void in their lives, left by the one person who would have known how to help them grieve. Again, the world moved on whether they wanted it to or not.

These two very different versions of young girls losing their mother always stuck with me, and are what eventually, in large part, inspired me to write Somewhere Picking Dandelions. The idea that children were expected to deal with such a horrible change with little explanation seemed terrible to me, and the thought that a girl could move on from this loss seemed impossible. Part of me wanted to know if they had ever put up a fight or refused to accept the situation, and this is where the characters in my story were born.

Aurie Hargrove stemmed from my need for a young girl to react to a situation that is beyond her control. When her Momma went into the hospital without warning, Aurie felt betrayed, and this loss of trust lead to her refusal to speak with her Momma again while she was away. I wanted to explore a time period when, despite the family wanting to explain circumstances to the children, they did not know how.

Unlike the questions that inspired it, Aurie’s story does not begin with death. Instead, it explores one girl’s struggle to accept that death may be imminent, while the adults in her world struggle with an uncertain future, unsure of whether or not Momma will get better. While Aurie’s story is different than those of the girls who inspired it, it would not exist without their bravery and willingness to move on.