Note: These are just some random, somewhat incoherent ramblings that I wrote in the first days immediately following my grandfather’s death. Things are getting better as the days go by but I decided to publish this because it really captured my emotions about his death in the couple of days immediately after he died. Since I wrote this, we have held a service and burial for my Papa, and I was honored to have written and delivered his eulogy. Lots of time with family and recollections of my Papa’s life have been extremely helpful during this process. Thank you all for your kind messages and words.
It has taken me all 27 years of my life to understand grief, to experience a real and meaningful loss for the first time. I have felt pain, sadness, and heartbreak, but I have never felt true grief before. My grandfather’s death is the first major loss I have ever experienced.
Prior to this, I had only lost great-grandparents, and I was a child when all of those losses occurred. Certainly I felt sadness, but it was mostly the sadness of a child seeing their parents grieving. I didn’t understand. Now I do.
“It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer… and everything collapses.” — Colette
During this grieving period, I’ve realized how often you feel like you don’t know how to feel. You see people around you, grieving in their own ways, and you just sit there in your own thoughts, not knowing what to say or what to do.
But grief is not a thing to be measured. It is not a thing to weigh, not a thing to compare. Grief is something we don’t really get, but it’s something we all feel. And the thing is, we all feel it differently. We all grieve in our own ways.
I find it hard to grieve in public, instead bursting into tears at random moments whenever I think of him for too long or recall his theatrics when he entered a place, snapping his fingers, bending his knees, and singing “dun dun, dun dun” as he walked in. His antics used to embarrass us as we turned away in laughter and shame, but now I think I should strive to live my life more like he did. Now that I’m older, I realize I should not have been embarrassed at all. I’d do just about anything to see him doing that again.
“For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often — will it be for always? — how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, ‘I never realized my loss till this moment?’ The same leg is cut off time after time.” — C.S. Lewis
I’ve found grief to be an odd sort of thing. In the days since his passing, my feelings have felt like the waves of the ocean. One minute I am calm. Then I think too much, or rediscover a new memory and the tears begin again… the waves crashing in my mind.
Monday night, after going most of the day without any major incidents, I found myself in bed sobbing. Through my tears, I asked Jerry the toughest questions that no one can really answer: “Will I ever see him again? Do you believe in Heaven?” The absolute hardest realization for me has been that I will not see him again… at least not in this life. And that’s a terrifying thought.
But grief, in all of its strangeness, found me laughing through the tears eventually. I sounded like a crazy person — I guess grief does that to you — as I recounted one funny memory after another to Jerry, hardly stopping to take a breath in between each one as I spit them out one after the other.
I keep wondering when life will feel “normal” again. Wondering when a day will come that isn’t clouded with at least a little sadness. I want that day to come, of course, because I don’t want to be sad. On the other hand, I don’t want that day to come because I know that remembering is how we will keep his spirit alive.
My Papa and I were never the closest of the grandkids, and he always had clear and obvious favorites… and so I’ve wondered a lot about how I should feel, whether I was allowed to grieve out loud when he had children, other grandchildren, and best friends who knew him better than I ever did. He belonged to so many others, just as we all do.
But that’s just the thing. Just as much as he was theirs, he was mine, too. My grandfather. My Papa. We all belong to so many people in so many ways. So many people can say “he was mine,” and he was. “My Papa, my father, my cousin, my uncle, my brother.” He was a part of so many people, and so we all have a right to feel how we feel, to grieve how we need to grieve.
I need to keep reminding myself of that, since no one has made me feel this way except for myself. I need to remember that he was still a part of me, even if he might have been a bigger part of other people. I am allowed to feel these feelings.
My father granted me that unspoken permission, when he encouraged me to publish my piece about Papa, and I asked him if he really thought it would be okay with him and his siblings. I told him, “but he was your father, not mine.” My father, who knows I’ve been grieving mostly privately, told me it was okay to write what I needed to write, to feel what I needed to feel — that maybe we weren’t the closest, but oh, was Papa proud of me! So, so proud. And that even though he was his dad, he was my grandfather.
“Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? If so, then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.” — Mitch Albom
I’ve had a hard time reconciling my feelings now that he is gone. I feel guilty, filled with regret that I didn’t call him more or visit enough. I saw him two weeks before he passed and I made certain to tell him that I loved him. I had no idea it would be the last time I would see him, but I felt that need to tell him anyway.
If I had known it would be the last time, instead of two weeks since our last visit, I would have made certain that instead it was two days, two hours, two minutes.
Two. Two. Two. Dammit. Dammit. Dammit.
And now I feel this strong need to tell everyone I love that I love them — and to do it all the time. I’ve always been a prickly sort when it comes to expressing feelings out loud, not open with my emotions or affections, stingy with my “I love yous” and hugs since childhood.
But grief does that to you. It makes you want to shout from the rooftops that you love the people you love. You want to make sure to say it all the time now, because you never know when your last chance to say it might be.
To my friends and family, even if I don’t say it enough… I love you. I love you all the time. I love you when we see each other too much and when we don’t see each other enough. I love you even if you think I don’t.
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” — C.S. Lewis
Now that I have experienced a loss — my first real loss — I feel like there is this distinct before and after. It’s strange, because as an anxious person, death has always topped the list of my fears. Never my own, but always of the people I love. And yet… having never experienced loss, I lived in denial. I saw other people grieving around me all the time, yet never expected it to be me accepting the condolences, me sharing the fond memories.
I felt invincible somehow. But now I know better.
You know what it feels like now, in the after? It feels just like waiting for the other shoe to drop, now that I finally know that death is inevitable.
Death. What an ugly word. What a hideous thing. It has reached out its long, spindly fingers at last and touched me for the first time. It has taken something from me. It has snatched away my naivety. It has shattered my childlike belief that no one is immortal in this world except for my own tribe.
My own tribe can be lost, too.
“Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion to death.” — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
I want the guilt to go away. I want to stop thinking about my regrets simply because Papa was not the kind of man who lived with regret. I know that if he were here, he would tell me only that he loved me and that he was proud. He wouldn’t think of the missed opportunities. He’d say, let’s go get something to eat. He’d laugh. He used to laugh in amazement over my weight loss. A soft chuckle, an exclamation of both disbelief and pride.
“I answer the heroic question, ‘death, where is thy sting?’ with ‘it is here in my heart and mind and memories.’” — Maya Angelou
What is grief? It is missing someone who is gone. It’s different than the hopeful sort of missing I feel for my loved ones who live far away. It is missing someone but also missing the ability to just call them up and have them answer — even if you didn’t do it often enough.
It’s that striking realization that this Christmas will be your first without them. It’s the sudden and sharp punch in your gut when you still see their shoes and their shirts and their hats in your mind and realize that one day, you won’t anymore. One day, you might forget. You might forget that deep voice and that loud laugh. So save that voicemail (I’ve listened to it every day). Write down those memories so that in 50 years, you can still remember (remember the story about the Benz?).
This grief is uniquely mine. This grief is mine and mine alone. We are all feeling it — together, but separately. We all have different memories, different thoughts, different recollections. We smile wistfully as we recall our different favorite stories.
I’ve faced a loss, but I know that we will never really lose him.
Not if we remember.
Not if we refuse to forget.
“To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.” — Thomas Campbell
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