interlude ii.

i tried to write an essay about grief

trigger warning: this piece discusses the death of a grandparent.

sometimes i feel like i’ve never outgrown all the girls i’ve been. there still exists in the corners of my heart an anxious third grader who slams her fists on her thighs when she gets interrupted, an exhausted thirteen-year-old slumping her head against the window on car rides home (i never let her sleep enough), a toddler who sometimes reaches through time and space and acres of skin to tug on the sleeve of my sweater and say, i’m hungry. they’re tucked in on each other, russian nesting dolls, unable to remain in the past where they belong. ghosts who can’t leave the place where they died, i think, uncharitably. worst of all to face is myself at seventeen, who had so much and was so afraid of losing it, and now that i have she just hops up to sit on the bar and with a sad little smile says: i told you so.

there will be dozens more iterations of myself, stacking up inside me until the day i die. i already know what i’ll always look like at eighteen: forever pacing across a room, tugging my hand through my hair, talking until my lips crack, occasionally saying something comprehensible, like you blew it or you’re a failure or what the hell are we supposed to do now?

when i was eight years old my grandmother passed away. and it’s been ten years, and i was so young, so sometimes i think i should be over it by now. there isn’t a timeline for that, though, i like to think that my lingering sadness over my grandmother is proof of how much i loved her. how we lay side-by-side in a lavender room that now belongs to my sister but then it was the guest bedroom and i pulled my blankets up to my chin and thought, for the first time, about the day that i would die, and whether my grandmother would miss me when i did.

to me she was immortal. to me, whenever i go in my sister’s room, fifty fables for children is still sitting on the desk and my mother is still ushering me out so my grandmother can get some rest. to me she has to be immortal because i haven’t forgotten her and i love her and they never let me see the grave, anyway.

i think the worst kinds of grief are when you don’t even have a body to blame.

a human body is fallible. it’s soft and hairy and it breaks easier than we expect it to. remembering someone is an idea. it’s forever young, forever fresh, forever picking raspberries in the backyard. i can filter out the bad parts, cast the scenery in rose gold, keep turning it over to find a different angle on the situation. when i think about my grandmother, there isn’t an angle i can find where she looks wrong. but i understand what it means to keep picking those memories apart. sometimes it feels like all i know how to do.

i get a minute in the morning, sometimes, a minute after i wake up that’s peaceful and blank and quiet before i remember how hopelessly alone i am. before the stabbing feeling in my gut starts up again. grief turns everything into before and after. grief turns all the days into each other, an endless sacrosanct summer, where i don’t remember what happened to time before it started bleeding, before nothing felt important and food started tasting like metal again and i turned into the ghost i was so frightened of becoming.

what, by the way, does it mean to grieve someone who is still living?

i ask a lot of questions that don’t get answered. when i was in elementary school a liberal candidate for minister of parliament came to give a talk and then took questions and i asked, what does the liberal party intend to do about the indigenous land dispute in the northwest territories? she laughed and said, who told you to ask that question?

(the answer, of course, was no one, it was an issue that came up in one of the debates we’d watched ahead of her visit, but i was so embarrassed by the response that i put my hand back down, cheeks smarting.)

at least no one disputes the legitimacy of a question they never hear.

the girls inside me aren’t happy when they go unheard. they pull at my arms, my legs, my clothes, pushing me this way and that. i want to have better answers for them. i want to give them something to look forward to, but all i have is this solitude, this quiet and uninterrupted love devoid of meaningful messy mad connections with other people. this life that is entirely devoid of anything that i could, at some point, grieve. i have, in every sense of the saying, nothing left to lose.

but i would have rather lost my grandmother than never had her at all.

i would say the same about you.