The loss

There wasn’t much happening on this gloomy rainy Saturday afternoon. The toil

Of work had been tedious but a blessing for Mitch the last two weeks.

Looking out of the window in his little rented flat, Mitch was snapped back to the previous Thursday. The Thursday that he wished had never happened and wanted so much to fast forward time so it was a dusty memory confined to that special place reserved for our most painful experiences.

They say grieving starts to ease after the funeral, it hadn’t yet for Mitch. Now faced with the lone task of emptying his mum’s cottage, he finished his coffee and begrudgingly got up to make his way there.

The half an hour drive passed in a flash, not even remembering how he drove there almost in auto pilot he pulled up outside.

Opening the door he took a needed steadying deep breath and pushed himself in.

No nostalgia hit him, he had barely been in his late mother’s home.

estranged for almost twenty years this wasn’t the home they had shared. An occasional dutiful phone call, the mandatory visit at christmases were brief and functional. There was no shared history here.

Theirs had been a strained relationship, just the two of them, Mitch knew nothing about his father, it was taboo. He had accepted innocently as a child would but as a frustrated teen becoming a young man his requests to know falling on deaf ears at best, a berating rage spewing from his mother at worse. He was still none the wiser.

Kneeling on her bedroom floor emptying the drawers and wardrobes of her simple basic belongings he wondered why it had mattered to him and to her so much that it drove a wedge between them.

For Mitch he now understood his need to know who he was, where he came from but still not understanding how it could have been for her.

Ah! Her forbidden shoe box!! He was almost scared to take it from the wardrobe.

Hands trembling he stopped himself from opening it.

As a curious 6 year old he had found the box when playing and excitedly opened it. Disappointingly for him then it didn’t have a new toy for him hidden away for his birthday, just envelopes and paper. He was about to put it away when his mother came in to the room and seeing the contents of the box in his hands snatched it from him ranting and shooing him away. Mitch remembered how confusing it was and how her reaction had been so extreme. Not an overly warm woman at the best of times, she was usually quiet, this banshee he had never seen in her before.

He jolted back from the memory, considered just putting the box in the bin but he knew if the contents provoked such a reaction then it had to be important.

Pretty much as he remembered it was envelopes, letters, papers, no treasure! Differently though now he could read and saw many envelopes addressed to him in there too.

A pile actually, all unopened, stamped going back over 30 years. The others to his mum had been ripped opened.

An hour later, legs numb from kneeling, tears drying on his cheeks, two piles of $50 notes( one for every week of his first eighteen years of life) stacked in front of him and a small black diary hanging from the loose defeated hands of a no longer protected man who finally got what he both wanted and needed.