she is gone

My grandmother died in December. For most of the month, none of the days felt like what they actually were; the week held in weekend’s twilight, the weekend itself taking on a sheen of business hours. She’d lived with us through autumn, putting in the hard work of a beautiful recovery from a September fall and exceeding the expectations of all those who did not know what she was capable of, of the strength certain frailties concealed. Then, in November, a blindside: something her great and giving heart could not endure. The day before it happened, we were preparing her house for her to return to, her life for her to return to—nothing less.

Get home safe, she told us the last time we saw her, that same day. Get home ahead of the rain.

Home—the rain—the phone’s ring early next morning.

All my life, it had always been her on the other end of the line. I’d had surgery in ‘21 and the healing process demanded a certain amount of dedicated movement a day, so I’d call her as I shuffled through the house. She’d help wile those uncomfortable minutes away by telling me what happened on that afternoon’s episode of Days of Our Lives. We talked to (and saw) each other very regularly, but after that, for the next two years, every single day, a call. We traded narrative arcs of fiction and life, and left off on the promise that I would talk to her tomorrow and think of her that night.

The time I told her I would be a published author. Asking her if she could believe it—I couldn’t. Yes, she answered without hesitating. Yes. Her insistent response to the creative difficulties that have defined my recent work, the book I’ve been struggling to write: it’s got to get better. It will all work out.

Before the funeral, there was a day the house felt haunted. That night, I passed the room she slept in and I thought I could sense her there. And all that day, I was planning phone calls I wouldn’t be able to make to her, at a number that belongs to no one now, then remembering.

At the funeral home, the open casket. She was so there, it was impossible to believe she was gone. And so, not believing it, my mother, sister, and I folded the coffin’s lining around her then put our hands to and slowly lowered its lid for all time.

She is gone.

There’s a false idea that loss sits beyond a place of expression, that this kind of heartbreak and devastation cannot be put to words. That’s not true. Those are the words. Devastated. Heartbroken.

I was grieving, I am grieving. Grief is the underpinning and consequence of more experiences than we’re willing or know how to assign it to. Grief was the conclusion I arrived at in my last newsletter when I was struggling to contextualize the long period I’ve spent in a dark place. Without Nick Cave’s generously shared insights on his own losses, and the parameters he was willing to extend the definition of that loss to, I’m not sure I could have. They helped me to accept the non-linearity of healing and release myself of certain expectations relating to that concept, helped me to recognize the ebbs and flows I was going through and all their attendant emotions and reactions as neither right or wrong, but a part of a much larger and transformative process. It granted me much needed grace and permission to be where and who I was and where and who I wasn’t.

And from that place of grace and permission, I wanted to tell you that reconciling with particular situations or circumstances does not always present as a light at the end of the tunnel, but the moment you realize you’re in one. And how, when you’re no longer free-falling and your feet are on the ground, you have the opportunity to point yourself in the direction the light comes from, to walk that path.

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Grief is hard, whatever the cause or shape of its loss. It is a painful state to occupy and a painful state for others to bear witness to, and because it is so often precipitated by what is incomprehensible and senseless, and because it can take you to the farthest corners of your least right mind, learning how to navigate and make the adjustments necessary to meet its new reality can take a great deal of effort and time. It tests the limits of all patience, compounding and manifesting in more loss.

Grief rejects the anchor of our lives and calls into question the meaning that gives that anchor its weight.

But it doesn’t deny that meaning—it invites us to answer the question.

Not so long ago, I couldn’t think of an answer at all.

I have been thinking a lot of it lately.

If grief renders our life unrecognizable, it’s also an opportunity to become unrecognizable to what is now a former life. I was grieving, I am grieving, it is a new year. It is a new year, and in this new year, I want to become a stranger to who and what grief forces you to leave behind by not carrying the sharp and unforgiving edges of my losses forward, but the more tender and vulnerable places they’ve created inside me. To reach past what is ungenerous in me and to be more generous, to reach past my impatience and to be more patient, to reach past my brittle cynicism and to engage more in good faith.

Is that too sentimental? No matter. Shortly after my grandmother died, I began tentatively outlining the novel that I’ve fought with for the last five years, and most recently spent an embattled year pitted against my shattered confidence. It is a story that, in its own way, is about everything I have written here. I have threatened to give it up a hundred times and come back each because every other idea feels grey in comparison. There's something about this turn that feels different and part of me thinks it can’t be a coincidence, maybe another kind of call.

I don’t know.

But I do know this tunnel, and which way to turn in its dark. And I have a sense of the light and the path toward what she believed for me, and what I am working to make true:

It’s got to get better. It will all work out.

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