The grief is consuming even now, and although it has no teeth or jaws, it still swallows me whole. It has derailed me countless times over the 12 years since her death. I am in bits. A part of me is still there wiping blood from white tile. I am a dead moth on the window sill. I am buried under so much dirt. And I am here in these words. I am immense.
I have three daughters now, and I love them with the sort of ferocity that can choke me sometimes. But I would be lying if I said I do not also grieve what was taken from me. I grieve the person I might have become if had not been a young victim, a young mother, forced into unimaginable circumstance, seeded by compounding traumas. Did that girl not also deserve mercy? Was her life any less important?
It should not have been this way.