What no one tells you about saying goodbye to a loved one: it can be rapid. There's no "How to Say Goodbye and Come to Terms with Death in 3 Weeks" crash course. There's no set solution to the sadness that hits you two weeks later at Thanksgiving, a month and a half later at Christmas, another month later on their birthday, the silence of the phone call never received on your birthday five months after you held their hand one last time, the empty recliner when you return home six months after the last goodbye. Yes, there is grief counseling. Yes, life goes on and you have to ask yourself, "What would they want me to do?" These facts don't help evade the sadness of the statement: life goes on and your loved one is no longer a phone call and twenty minute drive away.
The day you say goodbye your head spins. It starts to rain and daylight savings time makes the world three shades darker than normal. The next morning the world is gray haze. Sun breaks through the clouds by afternoon, but your head is still in the morning's rain clouds. You count the decline on your fingers. Three weeks. Anger. How is that enough time to grasp death? To come to acceptance? How is this fair? You drift, you receive hugs from friends, apologies from professors and bosses. You are in a daze, trying to stay attached to your classes, your work, because it's the only concrete in your life at that moment.
A week after saying goodbye, you are still adjusting to verb tenses. To say "He was...," "He would have..." feels wrong as the sound moves up your throat, makes its way into your ears. It makes your eyes sting and your stomach knotted with sorrow. You look through old photographs with your mom while questioning the identities of some of the faces. You have to hold back your suggestion: "We should ask him who they are." That same week, you realize how many stories have disappeared from this world. You reaffirm the importance of family and sit with distant members, listening to everyone contribute their interactions and secondhand-tales into the anthology of your loved one's life. There's an empty chair at the table, and you know that he's there, the stories reanimating his memory.
Two weeks later, it's Thanksgiving, and it's the first time you celebrate without him, but you don't have dinner at the old apartment. Instead your nana comes to dinner at your house. You try to ignore the strangeness, the empty chair no longer at the table. Fast forward a month to Christmas and the strange is sitting heavily on your chest. You cry to yourself at dinner and miss hearing the voice that always asked "How's school?," "What books are you reading?," "Are you excited for the next semester?" You summon the memory of the voice that would request to sit at the end of the table, because he's left-handed and he doesn't want to get in the way.
It's the end of January, you should be calling to say happy birthday, but instead you're on a bus back to your apartment. You're far away from home, but you wear his saint medallion and write an unfinished poem even though you know it'll make you motion sick. The weight of sadness from two months prior returns, and although you know he would not want you to let the sorrow overtake you, you cry anyway. You tell yourself it's part of the process.
April comes and you've gotten better at accepting. Your birthday comes, and although you don't get the phone call or letter in the mail, you got a rainbow the day before. You cry, but it's not totally from the sorrow of missing; you cry because you feel love as the pending rain clouds separate and you tell yourself he has something to do with that. You light a candle in a cathedral and talk to him for a bit as you walk around, looking at the architecture. His medallion is still resting on the chain around your neck.
The sorrow becomes less frequent. You miss him when you visit for the first time after returning home. You sense his physical absence at your little brother's graduation, but yet, you know he's there, sitting next to your mom and nana. You watch TV with your parents and an ad for the World Series comes on, which leads your mom to ask, "I wonder what his favorite baseball team was." You dig back through twenty years of memories, looking for an answer, but come up empty. This time, the weight of not being able to ask doesn't hit quite as hard, because you can hear his voice telling you that no matter what his team was, it's still incredible to see the Cubs play. You don't know his favorite team, but you're okay.
The weather today is the total opposite of the gray that I walked through a year ago. I have been told at this age, saying goodbye to grandparents starts to become the norm. That's the way life works, but I'm still struggling to accept this fact. It's been a year, and I don't think I will ever truly say a definite goodbye. A goodbye is unnecessary when I see him in unexpected sunny days or in waves of comfort during times of stress. A grandparent's love lasts forever and transcends the black and white of life and death, from the first day to 365 days later.
