Lab Journal Entry #6

[matril]

"Anniversary"

Int., Tori’s lab, a new angle. TORI is curled up on a chair, pulled back from her table. She is contemplative and somber. Some moments pass before she speaks.

TORI
I haven’t had a very productive day. (Pause) My work is fine. Progressing just like I was hoping. (Cut) I guess I’m moody because Eli is leaving. (Cut) It’s not that. Not just that. (Cut. Takes deep breath) Today is the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death.

(Long pause) I thought it would get easier with time. Sometimes it seems that way. Distant. Bearable. And then a day like today comes along, and I feel like it just happened all over again.

I’ve talked about my happy childhood. I mean, it was really happy. I can’t remember a single event that was genuinely sad. Just the usual, inconsequential troubles of childhood. Maybe that’s why her death hit me so hard. I didn’t know how to deal with it.

(Cut. Bursts out with) It was just so unfair. She took good care of herself. Healthy diet, active lifestyle. Didn’t smoke or drink. She had regular doctor checkups.

(Pause) Not only that. She was such a good person. So generous and giving. I’ve already mentioned the work she and my father did abroad, but it didn’t stop when we settled back in the States. She became a social worker in our community and served as an advocate for so many children in difficult situations.

(Cut. Very quietly). Eli was one of those kids. A few months after I’d started going to school, I invited him over to play. Mom noticed his hollowed eyes, and the starved look in them when she offered us a snack. But then he ate so slowly, carefully, like he couldn’t be sure when the next meal was coming. She started the investigation the next day.

His mother wasn’t a bad person. She was in a desperate situation, no income, no job prospects, chronic illness. She thought it was shameful to ask for help. Mom had a lot of private conversations with her. She didn’t push her or threaten to take Eli away, though it could have come to that if his mother kept resisting. But my mom helped her learn how to get assistance without losing her self-respect. Eli flourished. She saved his life.

(Deep breath) Unfortunately his mother passed away two years later, but Eli was in a much better place by then. He was able to get placed with a foster family in our neighborhood. (Laughs) And we were like his second family. The two of us were practically inseparable. I think there was, like, a two-month period in seventh grade when I decided boys were gross and wanted nothing to do with him, but it couldn’t last.

During high school it was always the three of us – Eli, myself, and my other best friend Hannah. The artist, the brains, and the philosopher. Hannah roped us all into joining the debate club, and we’d spend hours discussing ethics and social issues. I know, what a bunch of nerds. We made a good team.

Our house was constantly full of kids. It took a while for my parents to conceive again after I was born, but in the meantime, they acted as surrogate parents for practically everyone in the neighborhood. They even had a few official foster children, including Justine, who had been rescued from an abusive home. She stayed with us long enough that I came to think of her as an actual sister. Mom definitely saw her as a daughter.

Eli and I started officially dating right before starting college. Mom said (pauses, looks down.) She said she’d always secretly hoped we would become a couple, but she didn’t want to say anything and ruin it. Being pushy about it would have been weird. But she was really glad we were together.

(Cut) Sometimes I wish we hadn’t waited to get engaged. That she could have seen the wedding. But we were young, still in college. And how could I have known she would be gone before I graduated? It happened so fast. (Pause) It was the middle of winter semester. I was distracted with midterms, and then Eli got a bad case of the flu. I’d had it for a couple of days myself, but he was laid up for two full weeks. Dad called in the middle of everything and said Mom wasn’t doing so well. I was too exhausted and distracted to register how serious it was. Eli was just starting to recover when I got another call. Dad said I’d better get home as quick as possible. There wasn’t much time left.

(Cut) They talk about the stages of grief like you pass neatly from one to the next, checking each one off on a list. Denial, done. Anger, check. On to bargaining, depression, a steady course to acceptance. But I sat there on the plane with Eli, bouncing back and forth from one emotion to another without rhyme or reason. One moment I was calm, collected, sure that Dad had overestimated the seriousness of Mom’s condition. Then I was sobbing my heart out. Then I was frantically going over her symptoms in my textbooks, looking for solutions, or maybe for a reason to blame her doctors for failing to prevent this. Then I was back to fierce denial again.

(Cut) When we came into her hospital room, I hardly recognized her. Cancer had eaten away her body. She had been so active. So capable. Now she couldn’t lift her own head.

(Cut) She recognized me, though. Tried to smile. Maybe that was the hardest part. Her mind was still as clear as it had ever been, but it was trapped in a useless body. All its marvelous functions were shutting down, disintegrating.

(Cut) I sat down at her bedside. Eli stood at the door, but she beckoned for him to join us. (Voice shaking) She put our hands together. She didn’t have to say anything. I know she was in terrible pain, but she seemed happy.

A couple of hours later, she was gone.

I just couldn’t stop looking at her body. How still and small it seemed. It had the form of a person, but it was just lifeless tissue.

(Cut) Eric was seven. William was barely two months old.

Two months earlier, she’d given birth. It didn’t seem possible that new life and death could be in such close proximity. But it doesn’t really matter. If William were two months or two years or twenty, it wouldn’t have hurt any less.

(Pause) And it still hurts just as much ten years later.

Comments

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

So she's twenty years older than her youngest brother? I'm surprised she didn't automatically say "Yes, we're [Mormon/Catholic]" or "No, we're not [Mormon/Catholic]" right afterwards :). (Since my youngest brother is eighteen years younger than me, I speak with feeling on this one!)

I'm definitely hooked. However, would Eli have eaten slowly if he didn't usually get enough food? Carefully I can see -- he wants to make sure he doesn't miss a crumb -- but if he had all this food in front of him and didn't know when he'd get another chance to have it, surely he'd pack away as much as he could?

[matril.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm honestly not sure how starving children behave around food, so I'd have to research that detail to get it more accurate.

I had to tweak the ages compared to the book because I figured a thirty-year-old, somewhat established scientist was a little more plausible as someone making enormously unprecedented breakthroughs than a twenty-year-old student, but I needed the youngest brother to still be a child. I figure with an older father, it's plausible that they'd have more trouble conceiving than younger parents. But the Mormon/Catholic explanation works as well. ;)

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

From what I remember reading, they would probably eat a good bit and try and save some for later. And actually I really liked that she was thirty -- it gets so tiresome seeing 22 year cast as top people in their field or at least well-established in their field when outside of a few cases that's very much *not* reality. And her parents wouldn't necessarily have to be Mormon or Catholic, but she'd probably get asked that a lot :). (I can see it, though -- obviously her father married a much younger woman, they had secondary infertility for a while and then she got pregnant again twice in her late thirties/early forties, and during the last pregnancy she was diagnosed with a quick-moving cancer. I don't think it's stretching possibility -- actually, it sounds like Elizabeth Edwards to me, except I'm pretty sure she went donor egg).