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It has been exactly a year since the death of Catelyn Stark when her daughter visits her grave, but in Sansa’s mind the memory is still as fresh as the flowers she places beneath her mother’s tombstone.
They are white flowers, not unlike those that adorned her coffin all that time ago, small roses and a wreath of lilies... They were the colour of snow, like that which fell so steadily back at Winterfell, the colour of winter - the colour of innocence. Sansa wasn’t sure who had chosen them, only that it hadn’t been her, but their stark whiteness reminded her of home. She wonders if that’s why they had been chosen. She wonders if Catelyn would have felt the same… White flowers, so pure and beautiful, Sansa had thought, until the dirt fell on them as they lay her mother in the ground, their petals sullied and bruised by dirt.
She remembers singing in the grand old church where they had held the ceremony, hymns and prayers that she hadn’t sung since childhood until the death of her father years before. By now she knew the words by heart; she had been forced to sing them too often. Perhaps this is the last time; she remembers thinking, now I have no one left to lose. She remembers every song they sang, every word of condolence, the sound of the rain that beat at the windows and the scattering of petals as they walked out the door – clean, white petals - but no - If it had been raining… She finds herself shaking her head, as if it might make the memory clearer, and though she knows there cannot be any connection between the action and the realisation, she sees that she is wrong. The showers of white petals that fall in her memory are accompanied by cheers and laughter. A wedding, Sansa remembers. She might have laughed at the irony if it didn’t make her feel so hollow. She no longer remembers whose wedding it had been but it reminds her of her brother Robb, married barely a month before wedding songs turned to screams and he was dead, their mother shot trying to shield him – and still it was not enough. Robb had died instantly and a week later his mother had followed him. She had missed her own son’s funeral, but Sansa had not. She looked on in silence as they buried her brother, with tears spilling from her tired eyes, knowing that her mother would soon be joining him.
Funerals and wedding merge together in her mind and grief wells up inside her again as the memories of her mother’s funeral return unbidden to her mind. She recalls the moment that she not only lost her mother but all that remained of her childhood and all the hope she had left. It was then that she had realised that she was alone in the world and that no knight in shining armour was coming to save her.
And there were petals, she remembers suddenly, the memory slowly emerging in her mind like headlights through a fog. It had been afterwards, as Sansa walked alone through the graveyard where her mother would remain until she rotted into the soil, leaving nothing but dust and bones and memories. It was spring - and blossom turned the trees to pink and white as their flowers bloomed anew, their life just beginning as Catelyns had come to an end. Their petals seemed to dance upon the breeze before they fluttered to the ground, quickly merging with the dirt and leaves, white turning to grey and beauty turning to sadness. They had fallen so gently, with such fragile grace, that Sansa thought they might be butterflies when she had seen them from the corner of her eye. But there was no life in them now and their delicate beauty now looked vulnerable and sad as they lay trampled in the dirt. It reminded her of her mother, so beautiful back at Winterfell, before it all began, beautiful still as she lay dying. Yet frail and sad and grey, as she had been, in truth since the death of Sansa’s father, killed in prison after being convicted of crimes he didn’t commit…
Sansa could not help but wonder why she clung to these memories, why anyone did, when the mind was so flawed – a graveyard in itself where her memories were ghosts of the truths that were buried there. She never asked to be haunted, but she has suffered too much and in her mind old wounds are reopened and it is the ghosts of Winterfell that hurt the most. The memories are unwelcome but they are all she has left of the girl she once was, a girl who loved lemon cakes and sang songs of knights and princes, a girl who is still there somewhere, buried beneath the dirt. She can hardly stand the memories but they are all she has left to remind her who she is.
She is Sansa Stark and she will never forget, but perhaps, one day, when the memories come, the pain will not come with them.