I keep having this dream where my grandpa is still alive. In my dream, I walk in the front door and there he is, right where I left him, with my little brown dog curled in his lap. Both alive and well. But I still feel loss, heavy and angry, squeezing down on me like a hydraulic press. Like a gaping hole in the universe that smarts when the air touches it. Like something is still missing, but I can’t place what and I’m going crazy looking for the source of this inexplicable mourning. Like I just walked into a funeral without realizing.
It’s like my mind can’t comprehend “gone,” like my consciousness is pushing up against nothingness and searching for meaning. “That can’t be,” the confused little part of me says, “He must be here somewhere, let’s keep looking.”
The only way out is, allegedly, through
Party in the USA plays on the radio as I drink a Dr. Pepper in the backseat of my mom’s car. It’s a beautiful, sunny, unseasonably warm winter day and the lake is shocking blue. There’s a seagull perched on top of the car to our right. It’s so fucking annoying how beautiful it is outside. The sunshine feels offensive. My grandpa has been dead for barely 48 hours, and my workplace-allotted bereavement time is almost up.
My brother wears sunglasses to the memorial, but I feel, mostly, fine. I guess that’s not quite true. I don’t feel much of anything, and I’m sure that, too, is some sort of grief. I do the polite thing, accept condolences from extended family. The weirdest thing about death is that suddenly everyone wants to share their own stories of loss with you, so I listen to my great aunts talk about their moms dying. I want to be left alone to look at the wall of pictures, to study my grandpa’s face throughout his life, to touch the wooden carvings he made.
I want to skip the messy parts, the parts that feel uncomfortable. My room is a mess, sure. I never fold my t-shirts or line my shoes up neatly, and I have a bad habit of drinking half my coffee and leaving the rest sitting on the nightstand. But in my heart, I like to keep things compartmentalized, filed away nicely so I never have to feel any harsh feelings. I thought that would work here, too. I had time to prepare, after all. This wasn’t sudden— a steady decline for years, a hospice sentence the Wednesday before Christmas. I had time to sit quietly and think, okay, what will it be like to have someone die, try to walk myself through it, like I’m looking up the menu online so I know what I want to order when I go to a restaurant. Surprisingly, not everything can be planned for.
What makes its way back to you…and what doesn’t
I lost my favorite necklace almost a decade ago. A gold pendant shaped like Arizona– a gift from my mom. I searched high and low for it, devastated. Did I leave it at a friend’s house? Did it fall in some crevice of a dorm room and get left behind, lost in the shuffle? I gave up, eventually, and my husband bought me a not-quite-the-same replacement about five years ago as a gift.
Loss isn’t funny… but also, sometimes, it is funny. My grandpa is— was— what I would affectionately call a hoarder. Everything was something to be collected, that might be worth something someday, that we might want someday. There were collectible coins, and beautifully crafted miniatures he made. An old Penthouse magazine from the 70s, a newspaper clipping of his son’s early death tucked inside a crayon-drawn Father’s Day card from my brother. There’s a picture of me and my brother hanging above his bed, and a horseshoe hanging above the door. There’s a piece of notebook paper with a child’s handwriting that says “You udopted a pet from Caty’s pet shop [sic].”
I get a text from my mom one morning, a picture, as they parse through grandpa’s treasure trove. And it’s my necklace… all these years later. I must have lost it somewhere in the house, some summer between dorms. And he held onto it, in his usual, She might want this someday way.
Amid this much bigger loss, something I thought was gone for good made its way back to me. It’s bittersweet. It’s bigger than it was before, more meaningful. It’s not just a necklace that reminds me of where I was born, but it’s a reminder that he was thinking of us, all the time, and sure, I would have liked to have had the necklace back when he found it. But is there, like, a metaphor about loss in there?
We don’t get it all back. Or maybe we do. Maybe the prophets and the zealots are right and there’s something at the end of the road. We want to believe it more, I think, when it’s someone we love. That goneness doesn’t sit right with us. We think, they can’t just be gone, that’s unacceptable. It’s final and final doesn’t make sense.
I’m not an expert on loss. I don’t know if it ever gets simpler, less messy, easier to comprehend. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop waking up and forgetting, and then remembering, or if the wound will ever close. From the sound of it, it never really does. But I guess it comes full circle. Two of my husband’s close friends just welcomed babies. One of my best friends just got married, and two more are having weddings soon. There’s a lot of beauty and privilege in being human and being alive and getting to love other people. And there’s a lot of grief, too. It’s just part of it, unavoidable. And in the end, it’s worth the trade off.