On the one-year anniversary of my Grandmother’s death I was in Seattle, exploring a new city and playing tourist. The day crept up on me in a way I never thought it would – I had no idea that it had been a year. It seemed like so much more time had passed, but at the same time that it just happened yesterday.
I have no qualms with saying that my Grandmother was basically my third parent. She continued to insist that I always had a place to stay at her house, even through all of her hospital stays. Three days before she died she told me this, her body hooked up to various tubes and breathing machines. She coughed out her brand of comfort: a safe space. Life was fine at home but she always let me know the option was open.
There is a lot of regret inside of me when it comes to her death. Is it like this for everyone? I’ve never had anyone close to me pass before, so I am unsure if this is common or not. I think I resented the fact that she was dying and felt as though if I stayed away it wasn’t happening. Sure, when I came around I was in Super Girl mode: running errands for her and keeping her company, but deep down I wanted to stay a hundred miles away from the front row seat she wanted me to have to her deterioration.
My Grandmother talked about her death to me often, assuring me that things would be okay. It was during these talks that we spoke about how death wasn’t really that big of a deal. After all, it is a thing that happens to everyone. She had been fighting cancer for years, so it wasn’t like it was some huge surprise. We knew she was going to die from the disease, but what I hadn’t prepared for was the punch-in-the-gut of loss that accompanied her passing a few weeks after the fact.
Can you feel death? I could tell the night before she died that the time was coming. I sat upstairs at my sister’s house and cried and cried and cried. I had never experience such complete loss. My sister came upstairs and held me and we cried together. While it was therapeutic, it was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to total tears expelled. The next day I was standing in a K-Mart (yes they exist) when my knees buckled and my stomach felt full of bile. My mother felt the same as well and we went on home to be in our own space while we felt so ill. It was when we walked through our own door that we got the news that my Grandmother had passed. I’m pretty sure I didn’t cry that time. On the year anniversary of her death, I came down with strep-like symptoms and had to stay in my hotel room for the whole day. Related? Who knows, but it’s a weird coincidence.
It took a while for the tears to come, but when they did they never seemed to stop. While it was more of a nightly thing, I found myself missing my Grandmother’s calls that I would so often receive. She always wanted to hear about my school and just any update in my life. I hate that I used to find these calls as an annoyance because I would give up a lot of things to have those calls back in my life. I guess that the kind of thing you realize when someone is gone.
I was angry for a long time about a lot of things dealing with her death, but I’ve realized that you have to let go. Cliché, yes, but it’s the truth. My anger and sadness absorbed my entire being. I was angry at family members involved, family members not involved. I directed my anger at anyone who touched her life in any way, and this anger leaked into other facets of my life in the form of anxiety. I found myself on an unhealthy spiral of sadness and anger. Where part of me felt like I needed to be “over it,” I still found myself crying at the thought of her. I was such a mess.
On the year anniversary of her death I did not cry. I didn’t cry the day before that nor the day before that. Honestly, I don’t remember the last time I cried over her. Progress, right? Maybe it takes a year to get over death. Maybe longer, maybe shorter. I think it’s different for everyone. All I know is that I had to give myself adequate time and tell myself that it was okay to continue grieving.
Death can sneak up on you, but also sometimes you can see it for the whole time that it’s coming. There’s no set way on dealing with death, and I think that the only certainty of it. All I can say is that you should take it at your own pace. Life can be hard. Hell, death can be hard and it is literally the opposite of life. There’s no answer on how to grieve, no matter how hard I prayed for one.
Inversely, maybe we don’t need to fear death’s arrival at all. Maybe there’s no need to grieve as hard as we do. While death is scary in it’s uncertainty, it serves as a reminder to live life fully. Take advantage of the time you have. It sounds silly, but really watching someone die for the first time made me realize how finite life is, and how I needed to take advantage of more opportunities. Is this an insensitive approach to death, completely hypocritical to my previously explained grief? Possibly. But death does not show prejudice, it comes for us all at all ages, and my takeaway from dealing with death is that it supplies me with the motivation to live. While this motivation may not show itself from the beginning, masking itself behind waterfalls of tears on a nightly basis, it does make itself known. It’s the little seedling watered by these grief tears, blooming into whatever growth it forms: be it inspiration to change our lives of some weird epiphany about living your life to the fullest. The possibilities are endless
Death gives you a lot to think about, that’s for sure. Even after a year.
