Grief is a circle, so they say. We walk around along this path, coming away from our grief and then walking back to it. Sometimes we travel big and wide circles and sometimes they're tight, little circles.
Actually, I've heard grief compared to many different shapes, as if this hard emotion needs the easiest of analogies to compare it to. It's a ball inside a box, it's a triangle full of sadness, it's a circle that never ends. Or maybe it's a lack of shape - it's a hole inside our chest.
Grief is an ocean wave, flowing and ebbing and moving in and out like tides. High tide and low tide.
So. many. analogies.
Sometimes I close my eyes and I see my mom in that last scene where she's alive and conscious. She's in her pajamas, hair unkept, and body pain filled. We sit down and have cookies. We talk about the ordinary.
The ordinary. The normal. I tell her about the girls. I talk about subbing. I have to share the conversation with my dad, who calls on his lunch break and talks for half an hour.
I imagine driving over to her house and stepping into that scene- because in my head it is frozen in time. When I left that day, I said I will see ya later, mom. I remember staring at the stained deck stairs as I leave, holding a bag of Walmart French fries she has sent home with me because my Dad couldn't eat them. In my memory, I'm swinging this bag. This white Walmart bag, heavy with frozen potatoes.
It is the last gift my mom will give me.
Frozen, Walmart French fries.
But it is ordinary. Sending something home with your kids, right? That is the gesture here? We live our lives in the ordinary. In just the other moment?
My middle daughter is still grieving in heavy waves that I can feel roll off her sometimes. Grandma didn't live to see her graduate from high school. She just recently talked about that day. It was a painful day for her.
Grandma wasn't there. Grandma made her older sister's graduation, but she wasn't at hers.
Also, her shitty boyfriend at the time ditched her graduation to pack a suitcase.
And her other grandma ditched her because she couldn't stand the other people coming to the graduation dinner, so instead of being an adult she chose to hurt her granddaughter.
Grief is a photo frozen with pained smiles and big events.
Grief is a lack of a photo.
I dreamed of my mom the other night. She pulled up in her bright, red mini van and I swung the heavy, side door open. Just like I did a million times before. The sound of the door echoes in my head. I can hear it my ears. I feel the weight of the door in my fingers. She's in the driver's seat, explaining that she knew she was going to die and it was okay. We chatted a while and she drives away.
I do believe she knew. She started teaching my dad how to make tator tots in the oven, and she wrote down the dog's medication list for my dad to follow the week before. She refused to go to the doctor before that day, because she kept saying she didn't want to die alone in the hospital.
She knew.
I still have that list, written in her shaky handwriting.
Grief is a shape. Grief is water. Grief is explained best in analogies.
Grief is part the ordinary.
