His mother knew mine. She had prayed for a baby boy for years, and considered falling pregnant with him to be her greatest blessing. My mother took me to the hospital to see him on the day he was born. We grew up visiting parks together on sunny afternoons - our parents would sit on benches and gossip while we played on slides and swings and discussed school classes and cartoon characters.
They assigned me as his nurse because they wanted him to die near a friendly face.
When we enlisted we discussed the possibility of death. He told me if something happened, he wanted to focus his final thoughts on what deserved to be remembered. If he died, it would be with an acceptance of the inevitable and a gratefulness for the ability to live at all.
I wish we had not been stationed together. It’s a sick and selfish wish, but witnessing such a great man subjected to unimaginable pain was not worth the comfort it brought him to have me there. Nursing was a fresh pursuit for me back then - I was yet to see the desperation of anyone’s final moments. The first time I saw it was in the eyes of one of my closest friends.
He didn't realise, when we had discussed death, how much it would hurt. I watched his face become strained in effort to think of something positive - perhaps when he walked across a graduation stage after not believing he would make it to 18. Possibly something less momentous - the feeling of grass under bare feet or the smell of wet pavement on an evening walk. Going to drive-in theatres with me and our friends every weekend each summer. The final letter he wrote to his mother. Knowing she was well aware how much he loved her.
I did my best to apply pressure to his wound but too much blood had been lost before he was brought to me. His breathing became heavy, erratic, and a singular tear rolled down his cheek. I picked up his cold, bloodied hand and gripped it tightly. His body stiffened.
For a moment it felt like I was dying myself. The room became blurred and I dropped his hand to steady myself on the closest wall. I remember asking why him, repeating the words to myself over and over again until they felt more like an alarm than a question.
Someone called my name from a nearby room. My abilities, however little of them I seemed to have when it really mattered, were needed elsewhere.
A nurse could not let their emotions show in a place like that - distress does nothing to assist someone in a worse state than you. I had to remain expressionless; impassive. Impassive. Impassive. Why him? Impassive.
I wiped my hands on my uniform, staining the clothing with his blood, and stumbled out of the room.
The following morning I wrote to his mother and said he was brought to me unconscious,; that he felt no pain in his final moments.
She no longer prays.
Some nights, when I'm watching a film with my children that I first saw with him at a drive-in, I wish I had died first. Survival hardly feels worthwhile when everything reminds me of him. I drink to try and drown out any recollection of that day. But cold glasses remind me of the stiffness of his hand in mine.
“Do you want coffee?”
His voice rang in my head like speaker feedback.
“Cass. Do you want coffee?”
“Sure. Unless you can offer the sweet release of death instead.”
He sighed and trod into the room to sit with me on our bed.
“Don’t joke about stuff like that. I was worried.”
“Don’t worry for me.” It came off snarkier than intended. I leaned back on the bed, sheets sinking beneath the weight of my body, and curled into the fetal position. “I don’t like people worrying for me. Forget I have the ability to feel at all.”
I paused for a moment, trying to piece together the events of the previous night.
“Where are the kids?”
“They’re safe. I took them to my parents’ house a few hours ago.”
Safe.
“The boys were distraught last night, Cass. Parker snuck out of his room and I had to assure him you weren’t dead when he saw you passed out. They’re not sure what to make of it. But they’re okay.”
The stench of alcohol was still strong in my breath.
“I need you to really talk to me”, he said. “None of this forgetting you can feel. After the blowup when you got home from Sandra’s house the other day - this is getting dangerous. It’s hurting the kids. Last night it was like there was nothing I could do to help you.”
Nothing I could do to help you.
Every day for 10 years I had attempted to assure myself there was nothing I could do to save him. I witnessed deaths after his, but they didn’t weigh on me the same. Recollections of his death latch onto mementos of his life - playgrounds, letters, cartoons. That doesn’t happen with the loss of strangers.
“I just see him everywhere.” My voice broke up and I wiped warm tears welled in my eyes. “Sometimes I even see him in the boys. Now I can’t even keep them safe. If I lose them too…” I turned to face my husband. “There’s only so much that can be lost before you don’t know what you’re even living for.”
“Tell me about him again, Cass.”
I cleared the lump in my throat. “Why?”
“Because you don’t stop living for something once it’s gone. I know it hurts. I know you’d prefer not to feel it. But once they’re gone, it’s our job to remember them. So tell me about him.”
I wiped my eyes and sat up, taking my husband’s hand into my own. “His mother knew mine.”
Rationale:
Page 86 of Spiegelman's (1996) graphic novel Maus was the main inspiration for my creative response. Past-Vladek sits by a windowsill as Richieu plays alone on the floor next to him, and Anja is consoling him. Memories of hanged Jewish people float above his head, and in an adjacent frame, present-day Vladek states that it still makes him tear up to think of those victims. The life-long effects of trauma are a major theme in Maus (Spiegelman, 1996), but became overwhelmingly evident to me in these two frames. Vladek still became emotional thinking of the victims many years later, and his inability to forget the trauma of his past meant he was not able to be present with his family.
To find a creative direction for my theme of trauma’s lifelong impacts (and its impact on family members), I researched how wars can traumatise those involved in them. I became interested in having my narrator be a nurse. Being a nurse in general comes with trauma, and I leave it somewhat debatable in my story as to what my narrator and her friend ‘enlist’ into so people can connect with it as they see fit. However, I found an interview from a nurse in WW1 that guided my character’s emotional reactions and later-life repercussions. Tilton (as cited in Mccloud & Crotty, 2021) said ‘to watch [soldiers] die was ghastly… I want to scream and scream’, but she refused to let her emotions show. I knew Cass needed to be horrified by her friend’s death, but keep her feelings suppressed - I cross out the words ‘why him’ as she is trying to do this to get readers feeling the franticness of her inner monologue, and I thought turning to alcohol seemed like a viable later-life strategy to continue suppressing her pain.
While I was not able to illustrate haunting images of death floating over my narrators’ head, I explored the concept of death haunting my narrator through sensory means. My favourite example of this is “cold glasses remind[ing] [her] of the stiffness of his hand in [her own]” (Perkovic, 2024). I thought this would create an uncomfortable sensory experience to convey the pain of witnessing death just as the dizziness of page 86 of Maus (Spiegelman, 1996) does, and make evident to readers how even everyday objects can bring back unwanted memories for those dealing with lifelong trauma.
Spiegelman’s (1996) text is widely celebrated for its ability to transcend time and explore the past and present simultaneously - the graphic novel executes this through panel structure and an interview with Vladek, which weren’t viable techniques to translate into my own text, but I still wanted to attempt to bridge the past and present. I knew I needed to write a death scene and a scene in the future exemplifying the enduring effects of the best friends’ death. My solution to bridge the past and present was to allow these two sections to be read in either order, and to conclude my text with the opening line of the other section (or vise-versa if read the other way). This circular writing technique was intended to leave readers considering how everything we’re experiencing right now is connected to something we have lived through previously. The past is never really gone - its impact is inescapable, and this is especially significant for those with severe trauma.
References:
McLeod, F., & Crotty, M. (2021). ‘I want to scream and scream’ - Australian nurses on the Western Front were also victims of war. The University of Queensland. https://stories.uq.edu.au/contact-magazine/2021/i-want-to-scream-and-scream/index.html
Perkovic, N. (2024, June 16). English - Creative Response [Unpublished paper]. Lake Tuggeranong College https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uT6qhP3nEzEB1C7tmwJZyoxUczDuTN89mXi8BhOQ7qg/edit
Spiegelman, A. (1996). Maus. Penguin Books.