5/3/15 Dave Cryer 2 http://www.davecryer.co.uk

[WP Central]

My mum is dead. That is absolutely certain. I saw her body in the coffin. Like a waxwork it was. It wasn’t her. It was like an empty shell. She’d gone and she was never coming back. I saw the lid closed down. I saw the coffin get lowered into the grave. And I saw it the next day when the gravediggers had put all the earth back in and it was a piece of ground again, only this time with a coffin-sized mound of earth lying on top. No headstone that day. We didn’t know what to put on it. But it has one now.

She was dead and she was buried. That was a year ago.

But I saw her yesterday.

I was touching the soft wooden curves on Dad’s sculpture he made. The Hug it’s called: the three of us sitting with our arms wrapped around each other. I don’t think we ever once sat like that for real, hugging like that, exquisitely rounded, our arms all in tune, but it’s a perfect statement for how we were as a family, always supporting each other, always together, always looking out for each other.

[Katie Thomas]

I feel as if my mum is still with me even though I know that she has left this world. However, I still miss her. Every waking moment I'm still always remembering how she died. It seems as if her funeral was yesterday. She was always there for me whenever I needed her, whenever I was ill she took good care of me. It felt as if there was nothing left in this world It was only me and my dad. We were on the motorway when a lorry came out of nowhere and crashed in the drivers doorway where my mum was sitting. Later that day she was taken to the hospital where she was treated. After three hours, the doctors had told me and my dad that there no chance of her surviving. The doctor allowed us to see her where she said her last words. These last words were "take care of yourself and look after after your father". Soon later, the doctors turned of the life support machine and I was heartbroken and I burst into tears. I can never forget that day.

Moustafa, Kasim and Amir.

[American School of Milan]

I’ve been going to a psychologist to cope with her loss. Ms.Judith’s been expecting me to cry for about six months. But I’ve told her that I feel like there’s nothing to cry about, that I feel as if my mum’s still here.

 

Ms.Judith stared at the fan on the corner of the room and said very slowly, “Are you sure it was her, darling?”

She looked at me and waited for an answer, all I had to say was, “Who else could it be? Of course it was her.”

 

This psychologist didn’t know much about my mum. She didn’t know that her eyes were bright blue, the color of morning sky. She didn’t know that she had natural orange hair, curly all over. There wasn’t anyone on Earth that looked like her. All of this was making me think about something she said a week before she died, she had told me, “There’ll be a time when you’ll think that I’ll be gone, but I  might not be” I didn’t really pay attention to what she had said that day, not until she died. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but maybe she isn’t dead, she did have reasons to act dead, afterall.

Alejandra S and Paula M

American School of Milan, Italy

 

[Kelly Babbage]

Now I’m living with my dad and my stepmother Alexandra, who I definitely hate. I’ve always wondered if my mother’s still alive or where she may be, but all alone it’s hard to find out. It’s like everything is against me and my dad. And every time I talk about my Mum to Alexandra, she tells me to be quite and storms off. It’s as if she knows something that I’m not meant to know about. Perhaps something about the crash ...

Easebourne C. E. Primary

[Miss Naomi Flanagan]

I can barely go a day without re-enacting the crash in my head, every hair and shard of glass suspended in the air, time moving in slow motion. The psychiatrist tells me not to think about it so much but she can't stop me. It's funny, as when I remember it now I see different things and it's been happening ever since I saw Alexandra. The moment I saw her face something snapped inside my head like a little twig. Now when I remember the crash I look behind the glass and crumbling metal and I see the lorry driver and I see someone sitting next to him, someone who looks like her. Like Alexandra.

But it can't be, can it?

Lynda and Lauren, Pershore High School

[J Dennis]

Then at a dark scary night I saw miss Alexandra. I couldn't get to sleep with knowing my lovely kind mom was dead. Tears were streaming down my face. I was confused if she was alive or dead, so when I saw that face I decided to follow her. It was dark and foreboding and I thought for a minute that she was flying but that wasn't the case. I shook my head, ‘she's human.’ I said to myself shaking my head angrily. Then I saw a forest, a dark foreboding, black, dark forest. In it saw the most horrifying thing in my life. Alexandra walked up to a cute adorable squirrel and bit on it, sucked the life out of it, the animal turned grey as a skull and died. Then Alexandra grew sharp bug like wings that buzzed so furiously that they blew me off my feet. She flew into the forest and the last thing I heard was: ‘That was a tasty meal’ Alexandra said before my breath disappeared. I thought ‘what are you?’
‘I'm a changeling queen honey’, Alexandra turned round like she knew I was there the whole time. I felt my skull crack slightly in pain and I screamed. Miles away from home I woke up and there were millions of small bug insect biting and buzzing above my head and at that moment i knew i was going to die. The changeling dived for my neck all at once and then the queen of changelings appeared: ‘I'm your mother’.

By Hugo, West Kirby Residential School.

[Kelly Babbage]

Easebourne's writers: Gwen, Abbie, Robyn