The mausoleum was a small rectangular room with the deceased stacked five high and fifteen down on either side. The interior was the same dusty blue I remembered. The business-like glass entrance was the only light source. I stood wedged in the heavy door like a cat who’d changed her mind halfway. To open the door even an inch created a vacuum that gave me rigor mortis.

Two rickety industrial fans in the back tried their best to cool the August heat but only blew dry dust. Old, overly formal chairs, small tables with stiff doilies, and mounds of faded fake flowers waited to serve the bereaved. Unopened notes were everywhere.

A stale, strangely Baptist cloud of emotional repression smothered me as I scooted in. Had the door not been propped open an inch – I made sure the stopper was secure – I would never have made my way to the back of the room to find her.

I’d only come there twice, but I knew how far down the room to go, which side, and how far up the wall to look. Some things stay with you.

So where was she?

I paced back and forth, looking for the little dinosaur plaque. She wasn’t there. My God, did they move her? My claustrophobia boiled into panic, but just as I turned to go, I realized: I hadn’t been there in over twenty years. When, in fact, was the last time? Was I ten? Or seven? Maybe I had only come once. There’s no denying I’m taller than we were when we were seven. I made one more scan of the wall with my eyes lowered to the bottom two rows.

There she was.

Surely they’d moved her down. I got on my haunches and touched the name, the dinosaur plaque shaped like a longneck. My little friend, my spark-plug-spirited classmate, in here with a bunch of old people. As my focus shifted to her, discomfort evaporated, and a deep shift began.

She wasn’t there.

As a child I felt we’d just left her unable to grow or move or breathe, stuck in an inexorable sleep and sealed up in a box. I still got to play outside and have Christmas and summers and McDonald’s. I got to see Jurassic Park in the theater.

While I believed the innermost part of her was beyond the clouds, where she could ask God in-person about science and dinosaurs and have endless recess, I’d seen her remains powdered and put away. Her little form was just like mine. I remember her hands the most, down to the cuticles. It was impossible to reconcile.

As kids do, I accepted this was the way of things, and buried it deep within myself. Come to find out I’d buried part of myself with her, and that part was unable to grow or move or breathe, stuck in the inexorable sleep of trauma, sealed up in a box. No wonder I’d expected things to be as far down the hall and as high above my head as they were when we were seven.

But they weren’t. I was taller.

An unexpected fellowship with her warmed in me as her absence from that vault became real to my senses. She had moved on from there long ago. So could I.

As I left the mausoleum, it was as if she took my right hand while I hoisted my rescued little-girl-self onto my hip. Together, we walked back into to the living air of summer.

For Elyn Jean Davis 🦕 Resurgam