when grief lives in the body
Before I moved out of my grandparents’ house at the end of Summer 2017, my grandpa was telling me how he’d started reading more (The Bible, mostly) because he wanted to keep his mind occupied, and not focus on what was happening to the rest of his body. Not long after this conversation I looked through the books that I hadn’t chosen to take with me to my dorm. My eyes landed on Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From and I brought it downstairs to give to my grandpa. The next time I stopped by to visit from school, Where I’m Calling From was in the same place on the side table next to his recliner. I’m not sure if he ever touched it, but I hope wherever he is now, he has time to read. Maybe he’s more of a Hemingway guy.
Forgive me for using this cliche, but it’s been said that “gone” is one of the saddest words in the English language. As we get older, we fail to acknowledge the fact that our relatives get older, too. We take their presence for granted because it has been a constant from birth onward. Even when sickness is involved.
Usually I’m able to feel things instantly. I like to think that I’m not a reactive person, but I am. As a twentysomething, I haven’t experienced much loss; just a lot of change. I’ve been to my fair share of funerals, each of them devastating in their own way. But this is a different loss, one that I can’t translate emotionally. The reality of it hasn’t inhibited my body yet, though I wish it would, because I feel terrible for being numb.
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. ”
My earliest memories of him were as a kid in the backyard of his yellow house, where my brother and I would be left to our imaginations. My grandpa taught us how to break sticks with our thighs, centering the wood on our skin and bending the ends downward till it separated in half with a satisfying snap. As a bespectacled little girl who wore all pink, it was the closest I ever felt to being outdoorsy. At night we made s’mores and sat around a fire together, the flames licking the sticks we’d collected hours earlier, my brother and I’s faces beaming with pride.
The summer before ninth grade, months before my brother and I would find out that we were going to be moving back to Cleveland from New Jersey, we came to stay with our grandparents for a week or so. At the time I was fourteen and felt ugly beyond compare and didn’t want anyone to look at me, not to mention I was dealing with the plight that is middle school heartbreak. During the family’s annual get together a week after the 4th of July, I was sitting at the patio table next to my grandpa. The party had died down a bit at that point in the night, and guests were in clusters talking among themselves. He turned to me and said “You’re a very beautiful young woman, you know.” Sure, now in 2019 I can go off a feminist tangent and say I don’t need a man to validate my appearance. Deflecting compliments is still a huge issue of mine. But the night my grandpa said that to me has stayed with me after all these years; he wasn’t being condescending, or saying it because he felt that he had to; he meant it. He never let me get away with feeling badly about myself, insecurities be damned.
During my freshman year at Ithaca College, my grandparents told me they were planning on coming up to visit me sometime in October. I was ecstatic; I was struck with a terrible loneliness not long after I moved into the dorms. I hadn’t found my niche, or a group that I belonged to. Being over five hundred miles away from home made it difficult for people to visit me, so I was often left to my own devices. Hearing from my family was one of the only things that kept my spirits up that year. They made good on their promise though, and showed up on a Wednesday afternoon. We went hiking at Buttermilk Falls and grilled out afterwards at the park. It was, and still is, one of my happiest memories. For Christmas that year, I gave them a framed picture of the waterfall that we hiked together. It still sits on their mantel.
I have a childhood’s worth of memories, so many belly laughs and late-night talks and pierogi-eating and moments that I’m afraid of forgetting. The path I’ve been on since I graduated high school has sprawled out in every which direction, but I am thankful that it led me to getting to know my grandfather more. When I got the news of his passing, I couldn’t help but feel as though I didn’t do enough for him. Still, I’ve tried so hard not to make his death about me. He was so many things to different people. “Granddaughter” is a part of my identity that I haven’t been preoccupied with the past few months, so I know that I need to do better. But in the past week, the past month, even, I’ve learned so much more about what the heart is capable of, and what my own heart is capable of. Love, forgiveness, patience, grief. Maybe my heart is just grieving silently right now, waiting to turn into a roar.