To cross the road that killed my mother, my children's hands in mine.
I've wanted to make this journey for a long time. It's a short journey and it doesn't have a destination.
It was 13th December 2015 - 10 years after my mother was hit by a car. She died the next morning. A few of us had gathered at my sister's flat (where we both grew up). But no-one really mentioned her.
"Come with me for a walk."
"I don't want to."
"I'll give you hula hoops."
"Okaaaay."
I put their little coats on their little bodies and we walked the short distance from the flat to The Crossing. The Crossing used to be just a crossing, banal. It meant nothing to me.
And it means nothing to my children.
Just like my mother. She's dead to them.
So I wanted to cross the crossing with my babies.
To show that I could trample on death with strength, defiance and maybe even joy. Those few steps a testimony to survival.
That was part of it.
But really what I wanted was for our feet to dramatise what breaks my heart most of all.
The fact that they were born after her death. The fact that nothing I say about her will ever conjure her in their minds, will ever suggest her flesh or her energy.
To them, The Crossing is just a crossing. The woman who loved me, who would have loved them (so much!) is just someone who lived Before.
And young children live only Now, and their blameless egocentricity teaches them that the world doesn't exist when they close their eyes, and Before is nothing but a story. Because of all this, my mother's existence has no meaning to them.
Just as The Crossing had no meaning to me Before.
Just as it has no meaning to every other pair of feet that cross it.
I wanted to witness that. I wanted to walk this most painful walk with little people who knew nothing of the pain.
I didn't tell them what The Crossing was to me. "We're going to Tesco," I said.
See? She is dead. They don't know her. They never will.
Yet the crossing still stands.
And so do I.
