Time is just a flicker of light

Twenty-eight years and six weeks later, she was gone.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can prepare you for the sight of your only child's lifeless body laying on a cold steel table in a mortuary. Her long hair -- dyed a dark auburn for years -- had been brushed, thankfully, and it fell down off the end of the table, straight and damp.

She was so particular about her hair. It was long and blonde for most of her childhood, but once she got to be fourteen, she began experimenting with cuts and colors and styles -- going from green to purple to bright red to black, bleaching it and shaving the back into a semi-"skater" cut, spraying her bangs into lofty heights, braiding it and decorating it with flowers and ribbons, a la Frida Kahlo. She wouldn't have been happy to have had anyone see her hair the way it was now, but at least it was brushed. "It could have been worse" quickly became my mantra.

I was glad she looked better than I had expected, given the circumstances. She was found a few days earlier by her boyfriend who had become concerned about not hearing from her the night before or that Friday morning. He went to their old apartment and found her, sitting on the bed with a sheet wrapped around her, her head down, and a tourniquet still wrapped around her arm. She had walked out of detox the night before -- probably soon after the last time I talked to her, at about four on Thursday afternoon -- caught up with her dealer and made one last purchase. She knew what she was doing. She was tired of dealing with it all. It was her third trip to detox in a little over a month. She had been kicked out of what should have been a three-month stay in a residential rehab facility just a week earlier -- after just a week there -- for bringing drugs in with her. She left a three-page letter detailing her misery and her plans, then she took that final sleep.

I looked closely at her face and wondered how she had gotten the scrape on her chin. Her skin was so smooth, so clear, that it stood out even though it was small. I imagined her stumbling and falling somewhere on her way to wherever she went those last few hours. I wanted so badly to hug her one more time, but we had been asked not to touch her. It had taken a while for them to make her presentable after the autopsy and they didn't want to take any chances, it being July in the desert.

It wasn't until the next day that I wished I would have taken one last photo of her. The mortician had handed me an envelope that contained her nose ring, her toe ring and a hair clip, but then he suggested they be disposed of since everything was contaminated -- I suppose that since she was a junkie, they couldn't be too careful. I wish I wouldn't have okayed the disposal of these small things and the sheet, but I wasn't thinking clearly at the time. We never did find her charm bracelet, the one Diana had made for her for her birthday the year before, with lots of silver charms of cats and bunnies and other things she loved. I don't know if it just got lost somewhere or whether she had sold it to buy drugs.

My life had come to a screeching, grinding, crushing halt. All I could do was sleep and cry. I had never felt so alone in my life, even with family and friends all around me.

My baby was gone.