Elephant Winter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,55

thought, “How can I tell her?” and was going to phone an ambulance again when she half screamed, “Enough, do something, Sophie!” but I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to give her more. There was only one more left. I could give her the next pill. How many injections had I given her?

Her body stopped thrashing but her eyes stilled and stared at mine. She breathed, gurgling and rasping, then stopped. I waited, holding my breath. I thought she was dead. I felt for her pulse and jumped when she heaved in another shuddering breath. She stopped again and then suddenly sucked in more air. I held her hand and she stopped breathing then suddenly sucked in another breath. She stopped breathing and with these awful wheezes she breathed again, and each time I waited until finally she didn’t breathe in again, not ever again.

Elephant breath is a tonic. If you have a headache the best thing in the world is to stand quietly with an elephant, its trunk in your mouth. After they took away my mother’s body, I couldn’t bear to be alone and I left the house and walked across the field wondering what to do now, looking through the darkness at the peaceful white fences of the horse farms, the spirit shapes of snowdrifts in the fields.

There are moments we get stuck in, tell over and over until time softens them. That night I could not be alone. The death thrashing was over but I could not admit it. I walked around the outside of the barns, once, twice, three times, and when I decided to go through the door Kezia was awake and waiting for me. She raised her trunk in greeting, stood listening in the darkness and then gently lowered her trunk and blew lightly on my face. I stopped crying, petted her cheeks and delicately she slipped her trunk inside my mouth and we breathed together, her gentle finger rubbing lightly along the inside of my gums. Her trunk was large and damp and I opened my mouth wide. She stood breathing into me a long time that night. It felt like a kiss and a greeting, I did not know from where.

My mother had time to plan her memorial service. And since there was only me for family I suspect it was planned for me. Our last party, in a way. She wanted Arvo Pärt’s Passio played in full. She wanted the minister to commend her spirit to God. And that was it.

I sat alone in the front row of the crematorium listening for seventy minutes and fifty-two seconds to her favourite recording of the dark ebb and flow of Pärt’s interpretation of John’s Passion. The chorus and organ in a slow descent announced Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum Joannem and I settled in to listen. Pärt’s layered chorus unwound the story of the long walk to the cross. I was relieved to hear the familiar voices. In a little while all those people behind me would stand with me and walk out of the old stone building and then it would be over. With my large pregnant belly I would walk out with them and then I would go back to her house and she would not be there in her bed filling the place with her loud music and her conversation. But for this last moment, her music still filled me.

—You’re alone now.

— There are the elephants . . .

— She never felt alone either. She loved you to bits.

— To crumbs.

— To blades of grass.

— To grains of sand.

— More than everything.

The music pierced the numbness with aching; she had loved this music and she could not hear it. If something is unbearable I set it down. This time I could not set down what I couldn’t bear. Listening to the music she so loved I was struck back into awful chaos by a thought I still think often: how she would have loved this.

I had always wondered why Pärt chose John’s telling of the crucifixion. I had said once to my mother, “He should have chosen one of the more dramatic gospels. It makes Christ so much more human to hear him cry out his doubt.”

“By that point he’s almost done with this world anyway.”

“But the torture made him doubt. I wonder why John left it out.”

“Perhaps he just assumed the doubt. Doubt is the centre, like the grit in the pearl. It doesn’t