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There isn’t any time to bury Alex, it is what it is.
With the monster raging on and Widmore’s mercenaries on their mission to kill him and everyone else on the island, there’s nothing to do but kneel before his daughter’s body and cradle her in his arms, one last kiss before he’s gone into the jungle, abandoning her even in her hour of death. Kissing her forehead as if one last kiss can justify the sacrifice he’d made.
Sacrifice. What a word.
Who is he to make a sacrifice? No, it’s not a sacrifice. It’s a mistake. A miscalculation. And how bittersweet is it that he gets to call his daughter a miscalculation?
And yet that’s all it was. A slip, a moment in which he thought he had it all under control and he had to watch his foundations crumble before his eyes with the quick flop of her body on the ground. Just a bullet and she was.
From present to past.
And he can’t even bury her, time slipping between his fingers faster than her life. So short-lived was her time and so is his now, with her in his arms and tears in his eyes.
It doesn’t have to be.
As her blood smears on his shirt, the blood he allowed to spill because of his selfishness, his own survival instinct placed before his paternal one, he has a realization. A simple one: if he hasn’t done enough by his daughter, he can at least make the time to bury her. No one else should have neither the pain nor the pleasure.
And if there’s one thing Ben’s always been good at is buying himself time. In a way, he’s always lived on time borrowed: his birth borrowed time from his mother, his parenthood borrowed time from Rousseau, his leadership borrowed time from Widmore, his health borrowed time (and freedom) from Jack and now his life… borrowed time from hers.
The first order of business is setting aside, woe as he is to do it, her frail body now heavy with death. And calling it a business seems fitting, cold, like whatever is left of her body. Pale and beautiful in the moonlight but tainted by the blood splattered right across her forehead where the bullet exited, like a particularly cruel depiction of a greek tragedy on marble.
And how cruel a tragedy it was, an execution, of someone so young, so innocent.
He bites back a sob and pushes her aside, his hand lingering on her cheek, seeking some sort of warmth that might draw him back to the radiance his late daughter had but even as he has her so near, he can feel she has slipped away. This is but a body and a body he must bury.
Hard as it may be.
Digging, it turns out, can be rather therapeutic in a moment of such despair. Physical exertion, it seems, has a way of tuning out when the heartache is stronger and after the first stab, with both hands, which collects just enough dirt to bury a seed, he continues unrelented. Gasps, whines. Cries and sobs. Tears fall freely down his dirt-stained face, but it’s not the blisters on his hands that make him tear nor the bugs crawling inside his clothes, nor the blood splitting out of his fingers — none of that compares to the storm raging inside.
And it is then, knee-deep into the grave and hands shoving back dirt rabidly like a dog, he understands, with absolutely clarity, what Sayid had meant.
You would remember if you buried the woman you loved.
Or someone, anyone. A child, a daughter he had nursed and cared for. A daughter he had loved. That he still loves. How could he not? Even death-ridden and still and now slightly above him as he digs deeper and deeper she is the greatest thing that could have happened to him. The most important thing in the world.
Did she know? Did she know that he was lying, when he said he didn’t care? Or were her last moments, in which he declared his lack of care, lack of attachment, just a confirmation of a fear long gnawing inside her?
Hope that she might have known how he felt, hope that she might have felt his love for her lies as dead as she does. No child ever feels loved enough. Every child deserves encouragement, reminders. Some kind words, a hug, a compliment. A kind ‘thank you’ and a sweet kiss goodnight. Even as teenagers, all children crave love.
And he let her down.
After all, how could she have known that he didn’t mean what he said when it took only losing her for him to realize that no power, no reign, no life preserved could ever compare to her? With her light gone, only now he realized he hadn’t known real darkness before and how, oh how, could she ever have known she was all he had left before succumbing to his emptiness inside?
You would remember if you buried someone you loved.
Every handful of dirt he has to push back, every jab it takes to go deeper and wider. Every bug that nibbles on his skin and every nail that splits. Every tear that smears his face. Every inch set aside.
Grief and regret turn into a sort of adrenaline high that keeps him working for hours on end, no shove too much nor too heavy. Arms don’t slouch, legs don’t complain for the continued weight heaved upon them, the back doesn’t ache for the unrelented exercise. How could any of that, after all, compare to the grief, the regret, the pain… the anger.
At Keamy for taking the shot; at Widmore for sending Keamy in the first place and, above all, at himself, for not taking her place.
Isn’t that what a father is supposed to do? Protect his child, at all costs. Die for his child if he must. Kill anyone that stands in the way of a child’s joy.
Pitiful, that’s what he is. A pitiful, pitiful man.
He stole a child and raised her as her own, convinced himself that he had done the right thing to keep her alive — she would’ve died in the jungle, he often told himself — and yet when push came to shove, when it truly mattered, he let her down. When the moment came to test his self-imposed parenthood, he failed.
He’d done the one thing a father must never, ever do. Choose his own safety over that of his child.
The title never belonged to him, he realizes. Never should have been forced.
What a father he was, burying his daughter before her time, killed as though it were by his own hand. By his own doing. He might as well have put the bullet through her head himself. The words that brought upon her death were nothing but his own.
What kind of father denounces his daughter? What kind of father denies his affections? What kind of father allows for the last words that his daughter hears to be those of denial, to be cruel lies?
You would remember if you buried someone you loved.
How deep the grave is, how much dirt he swallows until it mixes with blood, how many tears he weeps and how many times, exactly, he has to dig — not until his body gives out but until he does. If he’s given up on a lot, if he’s lost time with his daughter, he surely won’t now. He can’t slack, can’t show weakness, can’t stop.
He owes her that much. The dedication to make her grave fitting enough.
It is long after his body starts screaming that he feels like he’s dug a deep and long enough grave. Satisfying enough for a daughter. Imperfect, but after all, so is he. He was never made for perfection, it appears clearly now. Nothing he ever does can be good enough.
The sun begins to stir across the horizon when he picks her up and gently lays her upon the ground and perhaps he expected someone to join him by then, and perhaps someone has, but he finishes it off in a haste, as though he can’t bear to spare any more seconds looking at her corpse.
Corpse. What a dreadful word that is and yet whatever lays there on the ground is nothing but that. A corpse. Not rotting yet, but soon.
How filthy, how wrong it seems to know that such horrendous things will have to scar the image he has of his daughter. Larvas, bugs. All of that will ruin her, just like he has by taking her then, when she was a kid. She would have been better off without him, he knows.
But he’d always had a problem with selfishness.
Perhaps that, the selfishness he’d never learned to fight, is what makes him cover her face first, what makes him kick the dirt into the hole and lay upon it weeping when he’s done. One last act of pure egoism. That and the exhaustion which, as the task appears to be done, tries to overcome him. He doesn’t let it, though. With one last kick of strength and a last whispered and wept goodbye, he somehow finds the others and though he’s lost time, done beyond what he was supposed to do, he can’t find it himself to care.
No one else should remember what it’s like to bury someone he loved.
You would remember if you buried someone you loved. You would remember.
“27,054,” he tells Sayid one day, when all is said and done, to let him know his message is finally clear.
“What?”
“27,054 times. That’s how many times I had to dig to make my daughter’s grave. It was about over four feet deep and above five feet wide and it took me about six-seven hours to dig.”
Sayid frowns. Doesn’t understand, or pretends not to. Ben has always had a knack for surrounding himself with enigmatic people. “Why are you telling me this?”
Ben swallows the lump in his throat before he says, “You once told me I would remember, if I buried someone I loved. You meant a woman, a lover, but it seems that fate took it upon itself to turn it around to my daughter instead. And I’m telling you now, that you were right. I would have remembered if I had buried someone I loved, then. And now I do. I remember. I remember it all, and I always will.”
He seeks out any kind of understanding or pity on Sayid’s face but he finds none. Still, he continues, the explanation more for himself than for the other man. “27,054 times I dug, with both hands. I remember it now. I remember the sweat upon my back and the blood smearing my fingers. I remember breathing in the dirt and coughing out blood.” A pause, just to gasp for air and some sort of feeling finally flickers in Sayid’s poised gaze too. “I remember my knees scraping to the bone and my ankles swelling. I remember the bugs crawling into my clothes and the mosquitos biting me.
“But above all, I remember that none of it mattered at all, because none of it compared to my ribcage being torn apart by grief. Yes, I remember the bugs keeping me company and the fingernails split, but above all I remember how absolutely empty, resigned, absolutely distraught I felt when I took her frail, small body in my arms, cradled her to my chest and laid her down in that hole. I remember kicking down the dirt to cover her face first because I couldn’t bear to see her like that, in a bed I had made for her, like many others before. A bed I should have never had to make, and yet there I was.”
A tear lets loose down his cheek and he doesn’t bother to wipe it. For Alex.
“You said I would remember if I buried someone I loved, Sayid, someone I still love, because how could I ever stop? and I never thought how right you might be until I buried her, too. And I remember now. I do. And I will never, ever forget.”