One of my clients is losing someone. “This is a really terrible time of year to go through something like this,” I say. “There’s no right way to be or feel. Wherever you are is okay.” But really, I’m talking to myself.
On Thursday, December 8th, 2022, the first anniversary of my grandmother’s death, I woke up and lay in my bed and wondered why I wasn’t crying. It felt like a betrayal of self that I — noted crybaby! — had not woken up sobbing and inconsolable. The reaction did not fit the magnitude of the loss. I felt broken, so why wasn’t I visibly shattering into 1,000 pieces?
Let me back up.
On December 8th, 2021, we lost my mother’s mother, Mema (Anne Bunnell “Bunny” Fleming) to a rare form of bile duct cancer. We found out on her 92nd birthday. Almost immediately, my aunt and uncle moved in with my parents in Pasadena for a month and one of the four of them was always by Mema’s side. On off hours, they’d walk the dogs together, reminisce about their childhoods, coordinate her care, have wine and each other. It was a terrible month, but in retrospect, only a month — a small blessing.
All of her grandchildren flew in for Thanksgiving. We ate a bland brunch in the dining room of her retirement home, surrounded by other people’s grandmothers. Ours couldn’t get out of bed. After, we filed into her room and told her we loved her, saw the weight loss and the yellow of her skin. Then we cried in the parking lot.
When she was ready to die, she told my mom and uncle “no grandchildren,” and coasted out of consciousness before any of us could object. My parents called anyway. We came anyway. My brother landed just in time. We each went in to have a moment alone with her. The nurses said she could hear us, so I tried to say the things I wanted to say. I told her that just like she’d talked about her grandmother for her entire life, I would be telling people about her for the rest of mine (lol, hi). I thanked her for believing in me, for being patient with me, and for the full, deep friendship we shared. I thanked her for being such a good mom to my mom and for loving my husband like family. I thanked her for being everything an eldest grandchild could possibly want in a grandma and then some. I told her I was proud to be part of her family.
I realized it was the last time I was ever going get to tell her about my life, so I held her hand and told her about my life as if we were just chatting on the phone. As if she could respond.
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“I know why we try to keep the dead alive. We try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us,” Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking. “I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.”
When we packed up her apartment, I took everything I could fit in my car: sweaters, stationary, art, books, photos, makeup, skincare, meditation pillow, laundry detergent, clothing from Chico’s that I will 100% never wear, a “short hair only” curling iron device that I ended up getting stuck in my hair and had to cut out with scissors. All shoved into the back of my Prius, like she wouldn’t be dead if I just kept her things.
When Mema’s husband died a few years ago, his kids and grandkids received a bunch of posthumous handwritten letters he’d written to us during the years he was losing his memory to dementia. I asked my mom if Mema had written us any letters like Papa’s. “No,” my mom replied. “She just told you how she felt.”
She was right. Mema told us all the time. She would say the thing out loud, cry in public, loudly announce “this is my granddaughter!” upon entering most rooms. She didn’t believe in hiding her love and affection; life was far too short to withhold something so free.
Still, I wanted a letter. The apartment, her belongings, were all that was left. It felt so finite. I wanted more.
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Though none of us were ready to lose her, Mema wasn’t afraid to die. She also wasn’t afraid to talk about it. When my brother was a little boy, she once greeted him at the front door of her home with a pencil. “Write your name on anything you want when I kick the bucket,” she told him, matter of fact, and set him loose in the apartment to call dibs on her art collection.
She and I had talked around the idea of her death for a few years. She asked if I’d ever move to New York or to Paris, about our future plans, and I shrugged and I equivocated — “someday, I don’t know. Maybe. I like being here, close to you.”
“Well, who knows how long I have left,” she’d say, knowing what I meant. I’m not going anywhere until you die.
At our last lunch together, she reached across the table and held my hand with both of hers. “I feel like I’m talking to my best friend,” she said.
I said, “you are.”
I had a feeling. I think she did too. We didn’t want the lunch to be over, and we closed down the Villa Gardens dining room around 2:30pm. I walked her back upstairs for her afternoon nap, arm in arm, trying to be present, trying to move at her pace.
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She wanted a celebration of life, not a “funeral.” She’d picked out her songs, reminded us a few times that she wanted the flowers to be all white. (We knew.) We waited until spring to celebrate her.
It was a great party. All five grandkids did their thing. My cousin James led a guided meditation to honor her commitment to mindfulness throughout her life. My cousin Lucie sang “Landslide” and my heart cracked open when I heard the lyrics. “Can I sail through the changing ocean tides / Can I handle the seasons of my life?”
No. I thought. I can do no such thing.
I wore a navy dress that she would’ve called “just divine” and spoke about what a gift it was to have a grandmother with such a distinct point of view that I would always know exactly how she’d feel about my outfit choices, for the rest of my life. I hopped out from behind the podium during my speech to imitate one of her dance moves, bending my knees like so, bending my elbows like so, trying to move like her, to resurrect her energy. After my speech, a woman sang “Amazing Grace” and I sobbed away all my mascara.
Yes, I thought as I wiped my face. This is a correct reflection of the feelings.
It was comforting, to have my grief made visible, to share it, to speak and be witnessed as someone special and important to her.
At the end, we sang along to “Let’s Go Fly A Kite” and then we mingled and hugged and told stories about her until they kicked us out of the venue. It was a hard day, but it felt meaningful and worthy of her. Like if she were looking down on us from… wherever, she’d feel pride and gratitude for the family, friends, and community she’d built. And she’d know that we loved her so very much.
On Thursday, December 8th, 2022, I finally get out of bed. My husband asks if I’d like to meditate in her honor, so we sit on the couch, put on a timer, and breathe. I am a bit begrudging about it, grumpy and fidgeting. Thinking: How dare he suggest I be calm about this, even though I know Mema would want nothing more than for us to meditate together on her death anniversary. Then I leash up Roo and grab my headphones and we walk. I play my “Mema” playlist (4 songs from the funeral) on repeat and I plow through my neighborhood — up and down its hills, around the golf course, through the community college — singing under my breath to myself while the backs of my eyes pulse with feeling, but no tears come. Audrey Hepburn cooes into my ears languidly while I charge uphill with a vengeance. We are not in sync. I refuse to change the song.
Moon river, wider than a mile
I’m crossing you in style someday
Oh dream maker, you heartbreaker
Wherever you’re going, I’m going your way.
I crave stories, but my memories of Mema are mostly sensory — images untethered from time, sounds and smells. The end of a voicemail saying, “You don’t have to call me back! Kiss kiss hug hug.” The jingling of her enormous keyring, the size of a softball, that she wore on her wrist so she wouldn’t misplace it, then somehow regularly lost in her purse. The wrinkly skin of her elbow, which I would rub between my two fingers as a child while she pointed out sun spots on her arms and told me to wear sunscreen. Her huge, messy, chaotic handwriting. The way she ripped envelopes and opened presents straight from the middle, a destroyer of wrapping paper. The image of her eating a plain avocado as an entree in the dining hall at Villa Gardens.
I take refuge in material things: dressing head to toe in her hand-me-down clothes, swimming in her old goggles and cap. For the first six months, I used her skincare products daily, and every time I finished one, I’d melt down in the bathroom. Another little part of her: gone. An insignificant item, meaningless except that it represented a piece of my grandma, who was fading into nothing but memory.
Memory cannot correct my posture. Memory cannot insist I wear a higher rise pant. Memory cannot order an avocado as its whole lunch.
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After an hour of aggressive walking, once my dog has pooped twice and “Amazing Grace,” comes on for the 7th time in a row, the tears come. For like, three minutes.
It isn’t enough.
I go home, feed the dog, feel underwhelmed, post a photo on Instagram, because how else does a millennial woman tell her internet community, “HELLO MY GRANDMA IS DEAD AND I AM CONCERNED THAT I WILL NEVER FULLY RECOVER FROM THIS GREAT LOSS.”
I won’t fully recover. There is an enormous hole in my heart and my life, because I had 33 years with my lively, loyal, vivacious, dancing queen of a grandmother, who lit up every room she entered. I wouldn’t trade it.
And.
In Gestalt therapy, there is this idea of “Self” as a verb. As in,“Self-ing” or, the act of evolving/growing through interactions with your “field” (context) in an iterative way, is a process through which we develop what is commonly called “personality.” As a species that craves meaning-making and belonging, the idea of Self as verb implies that we are made and molded iteratively, in relationship, and stands in opposition to the (unhelpful, IMO) dominant percception of personality as “fixed” or “permanent.” One’s Self is an ongoing process; therefore it can change.
Seen through this lens: as a formative, influential, orienting force in my life, Mema was a huge part of myself (my Self). So while the hole in my heart remains, the magnitude of the space she has left, in my head, in my identity, in my field, is bound to fill up. As she fades into the background of my context, it is both inevitable and necessary for other influences, ideas, and processes to migrate forward, to become figural. None of this makes her any less foundational, fundamental, or important.
It is a disorienting thing to continue to grow and evolve when one of the primary people you were growing and evolving for is dead. When you were growing in order to say: “Look! See? Aren’t you proud of me?” And the person can no longer look or see. And when it really hits, that your person can no longer tell you “good job,” you realize must re-learn to trust yourself, to recognize the “good job” another way.
Which is where I find myself now: grieving but tearless, heartbroken but whole, standing on my own two feet (somehow, for a year now) while my darling grandmother — one of the great loves of my life — floats away in the breeze.
Let’s go fly a kite, up to the highest height
Let’s go fly a kite and send it soaring
Up through the atmosphere, up where the air is clear
Oh, let’s go, fly a kite.
This will be my last newsletter of 2022. Happy holidays, everyone. Looking forward to returning to your inboxes in January.
An incredible and guiding meditation (ha!) on grief, grandparents and growing with and beyond and for them. Thank you Grace <3