Grandma had just finished chastising me with words that drove me back to my stoic unfeeling view of death, demanding that I promise to not cry for her when she was gone. She came close to mocking the tears that hovered on the surface of my eyes, not yet brave enough to fall. I struggled to understand what she was telling me beneath the words she spoke and she clarified “even if you cry for me, I won’t come to you.” I could hear the pain even through the vague attempts at humor, as I knew she still sometimes cried for the husband she lost when her children were young. He never came back home from the hospital.
I mentioned the tears that poured from her eyes at my son’s funeral, clearly agitating the emotional content of the entire interaction. The sharpness of her voice was sudden and startling, as if I should already know what she was saying as she loudly proclaimed, “I wasn’t crying for him, I was crying for you!”
I’ve thought many times about attempting to write something about this past year of life. When I sit down and attempt to compose my thoughts, formulating words has become overtaken by the flood of emotion and thus, externalizations on this topic ceased.
In less than one year’s passing, my uncle, father-in-law and grandma passed through the thin veil that separates our earthly life from whatever holds death. While I’m not unfamiliar with death, I had spent many years calloused and cynical about it. My perspective, watered only by the intensity of pain I’d already experienced, was merely one of believing that the dead were probably better off than any of the rest of us anyhow. So even when death stung the edges of my heart, over and over, I could not cry and held my stoic jaw stiff to it all.
My reality was bound to the first dead body I held, no shrieking pain, cpr, tears, or begging God would bring him back to life. I was a mother and then quite suddenly, I was not. My mind and heart absolutely could not cope with this level of pain. Never before had I felt this. I vowed to never again hold a human being so dear.
I didn’t stop loving people that day, but the only way I thought I could keep from feeling this again was to force myself to believe I simply didn’t care. People are born and people die every single day. Building a wall around my heart somehow felt better, but over time my mind continued warping the unnatural belief system until I could no longer decipher what reality I lived in.
Strength was rooted in my lack of tears, but the enormity of my weaknesses also seeded there. Pretending nothing hurt was a way of life in childhood, but the insanity of it all bore even more fruit as I attempted to live in the adult world this way. Many of my own self-protective measures mirrored my Grandma. Creative forms of self-suffiency we’re an integral part of life. I didn’t know the wounds this woman carried, and I definitely didn’t accept that she understood mine.
It’s been six months since she died and I almost feel like I know her better now than when she lived. It seems completely bizarre, as time passes, that my understanding of my Grandma grows- and there grief grows bigger. The more I know about her, the more I know about myself....
The strangest interactions of my life have come since she’s been gone. Random moments of completely unexpected interruption, where people just stop and stare at me peculiarly. Often there’s a beautiful gentleness in the words to follow, a slight grin and some reference to how much I remind them of my Grandma. The frequency of this type of interaction has actually increased over time. Every single barrier to emotion disappears as the truth of this bypasses my defenses entirely.
And I weep.
All the years of pushing against what my heart already knew was true. She knew my ins and outs, strengths and weaknesses, joys and heartaches and fully loved me. I’ve never exactly been known as predictable, but she had an uncanny ability to know why I was doing whatever I was doing and I never felt the need to explain myself to her until the dementia caused such severe confusion that she no longer understood herself or her place in this world. All the unhealed broken places in her life flooded over her last year of life, and I learned to love her in ways that I’m finally grasping her love covered me through.
The intensity of my sadness is more over my own refusal to be loved. I look through the files she kept of her incessant research of the variety of topics that mattered to me personally and wonder if it was because these areas of life were so keenly interesting to her, or if it was simply because I was that interesting to her. I gather in many ways, both things are true.
Grandma took me in many times when, for one reason or another, things were too complex for me to remain living wherever I was. Her door was always open to me, as it was to many. Yet there was something quite different about the camaraderie between her and I, and she allowed me space to explore my world in ways that I just couldn’t elsewhere. She listened to so many of my crazy ideas that most would think we were both a little nuts as we’d go out in the backyard and create whatever I was describing, just to see if it would work. No one on earth has ever been like this with me besides her. I have no memories at all of her ever telling me that something would not work and she’d put her hands to working on it with me even if it seemed silly.
Ive done some cool stuff in the last six months that I’d love to show her, and honestly some of this I know she’d be the only one who would truly appreciate. Her delight in seeing me put an idea to the test, was and is, why I keep pushing on something until it works. Some people find my stubbornness to be obnoxious, but she found joy in it more than anyone.
and dammit, I cry.
i don’t cry for her to come back. I cry because I missed so much along the way. I cry because I didn’t want to believe anyone understood. I cry because I didn’t trust anyone fully. I cry because I refused her total acceptance of who I was. I cry because I was so busy trying to prove myself that I rejected the abundant love that was right in front of me. I cry because I can’t call her or talk through an idea and find zero criticism. I don’t cry for her. I cry for me. I cry because I’m mad that I’m crying. I cry because grief is still incredibly real. I cry because every single day I am here in the midst of everything she left behind. I cry that I can’t fix all the disrepair that she would have never let happen if time had still made sense and her body still been strong. I cry that I’m tired and weak some days. I cry over my disillusioned imagination that I can do anything I set my mind to... I probably can, but not all at once. I cry because I feel scattered and disorganized, also factually true as moving was not a fluid motion. I cry over stupid stuff like not being able to find a tool I want to use. I cry because I let so many things fall apart, but I have given this last year all I had.
Nothing is the same. I am not the same. It’s not that I didn’t know she was going to die, it’s just that I didn’t expect that I’d miss her so much more as time passed. I miss having all things be somewhat playful, work especially. I miss being enjoyed in whatever.... the world is missing something extraordinarily significant and I absolutely can’t fix it.
It’s thanksgiving and I’m thankful for retrospective understanding, but tonight I miss my Grandma.