Loneliness wells up in me like a tidal wave, the kind there’s no cure for. I miss him so much. My whole world has been forever changed. I see it all much more clearly now, how sometimes family is blood and blood alone — but sometimes, on very rare occasions, Family is blood and so much more, something deeper than genetics, stronger than a 144-year-old curse cast by a witch in Prussia —
Lost in grief, there is no light to be found.
What are you supposed to do when the foundation upon which you’ve built your life is ripped out from underneath you? No, seriously. I’m genuinely asking. There’s not really a guidebook for this sort of thing. I don’t have any clue what’s going on, and it is very, very dark here.
Where can you go when home no longer exists for you?
You try to make your own home, I suppose — and it’s hard and ugly and wonderful and embarrassing; it’s a thousand dreams coming true in real-time, and the person you’d be most excited to tell is all but lost to you, in a world you only have a window to. There’s no cell service in the afterlife, so you have to tell the moon instead and hope they get the message, wherever they are.
It has been three weeks since I returned my grandfather to the lake he loved most. It still doesn’t feel real. I am looking at the mason jar I kept of his ashes that sits on my bookshelf as I write this, and it still doesn’t feel real. Nothing has felt real since the end of Winter when the late February snow came, and with it, the knowledge that someone I love was going to die.
It has been six months. Six months of being only half-alive, perfectly fine and functional unless you look closely. Whatever you do, just don’t hold me up to the light. I get up every morning, shower, go to work, laugh with my friends, go to parties, go to the grocery store, do laundry — and none of it feels real. Or it’s almost real, but not quite; like the past six months of my life have been one big, long lucid dream. I have achieved everything I survived for, I have gotten everything I ever wanted and more — an apartment and a cat of my own, a job that I love (most of the time), friends and a partner who genuinely love me — now would be the time for me to set real, normal-person goals that are not based solely in survival, now that I’ve survived; but all I want is for my grandfather to be returned to me. I’d give it all up; I’d even go back to that horrible place where I lost myself every single night if it meant I could have him back.
ARE YOU LISTENING, GOD? I WILL GIVE IT ALL BACK. EVERYTHING I’VE WORKED SO HARD FOR. YOU CAN TAKE IT ALL BACK IF YOU’D JUST RETURN HIM TO ME, WHOLE AND COMPLETE.
It’s not fucking fair. Horrible people live to be 95 every god damn day, but the kindest man I’ll ever know didn’t even get to make it to 70? I’d like to file a formal complaint, please!
I cry almost every day now, just like I used to. I can’t get a good grip on myself. I can’t even write a coherent piece anymore; all my tangled-up feelings just spilling out onto the page without any rhyme or reason. I almost pity myself. I’m embarrassed by the person I’ve become in my grief. Where did that girl who could weather any storm go? She’s been replaced by a bird-boned boy.
I know it has only been six months, but on the other hand, it’s already been six months, and it still hurts just as bad as it did the day I got the call. Maybe this is just who I am now! A half-there person who cries at the most minor of reminders and yells at a god I don’t even know if I believe in! Maybe there is no way out of the Grief Hole for me. Maybe I’m not a person who can ever be okay again, with the person I loved the most dead and gone. Maybe I’m going to be stuck in this liminal grief space forever, never able to cross the threshold unto mourning. Whatever, I guess. I’ll just keep faking it until I make it. I’ll continue going through the motions, and perhaps one day, I’ll wake up with a heartbeat once more, like I used to have.
Probably not, but it doesn’t hurt to try.
Five minutes after writing this, I curled up on my bed with my jar of ashes and cried it all out like my grandfather was sitting right there beside me.
Right now, in this moment, I think I am going to be okay. I do not feel nearly as hopeless as I did when I wrote this.
I am happy and grateful to be alive on this Earth, even when it hurts. The grief is never ending, but so is the love.
