Ash

I'm just honouring the dead.

I stand over your grave.
I’m not crying. I haven’t cried since you died, right there in the hospital bed, your face pale and cold as death. You looked like my morbid vision of the grim reaper, an older, though too young to die, version of me. A prettier version of me. What happened to your genes when they got to me? The 'second-hand' syndrome?
You wrote me a last letter, going on about how you wanted to be cremated and scattered across the sea. I burned it. I cremated your stupid letter. Told my brother you wanted to be buried in the churchyard you always found so haunting.
It’s not like dying makes me forgive you. When you die, everyone automatically loves you. I loved you, but not anymore. So much for 'honouring the dead', for paying their due respects. It's different with you; you could’ve chosen not to die once you got the mole.
You were a doctor. You would’ve known instantly what it meant.
But instead of going to the hospital and getting the treatment you needed for wanting a stupid tan, you listened to me ramble on about my oh-so-terrible life and my doomed love affair with Sean.
And then I had to go and get pregnant.
That, of course, convinced you that I was much more important than the bleeding mole by your neck, screaming at you that you had skin cancer.
So when I finally found out, I took you to the hospital.
By then, of course, it was too late.
You died a hero. You died for me.
But dying was the most selfish thing you could do.
I look at your gravestone impassively before crouching down and scratching a few jagged, near-unreadable letters on it, with my small, knife-sharp nails:

Here lies my mother
She was a hero

'There,' I say. 'I'm honouring the dead.'