On Loss

I am firmly of the mentality that life goes on and time heals all things. These are cliches and Hallmark card sayings I keep in my head, and they are generally true. What does not kill you makes you stronger, and surviving the worst week of your life enables you to better confront the obstacles ahead.

So I am still shaken that over a year (in one case) and four months (in the second) I am still shattered by the loss of my grandparents.

Maybe it is because they are both gone. In the case of my maternal grandparents, I still have my grandmother, I still have that link to my grandfather (who passed away in March of 2003). She's still here. I call her nearly every week. I tell her about my life, my graduate school acceptances, what I am doing, where I am moving, my classes, men in my life, problems I'm having. She's still a vital part of my life, and, through her, my grandfather remains linked to me. I do not have that for my paternal grandparents. They were both yanked away from me. Brutally. Rapidly.

When I found out that my grandmother had lung cancer I screamed. At God. I screamed at God. I don't even really talk to God. I talk to He or She or It maybe once a year, Yom Kippur, when I'm fasting and beating my chest with the rest of the Jews. God and I, we aren't precisely close. And so God became the focus of my wrath, driving home that hot summer dear, hysterical all the way down I-75 and I was not hysterical like that again until my grandmother's funeral. And I haven't been hysterical since. I was furious, at God. How dare God do this to my grandmother. To my father. To fucking me. How dare He rob her of what could have been the most fulfilling, the most rewarding years of her life. How dare anyone take my grandmother from me at this point in *my* life: graduating college, becoming a woman, the oldest daughter of her oldest son.

I still haven't come to terms with it. Had it been one, maybe. I was close with both of them, I was lucky enough to have that. My grandfather and I had the same sense of humor, I understood him. When I was young, I was terrified of him--he was tall, and gruff, and rather imposing, but one just had to learn to speak his language. But my grandmother was the sort of woman who would spoil her grandchildren rotten. She lived for the maternal. She was the feminine mystique. Were she still here, today, I know she would be happy. Her grandchildren are maturing, my youngest cousin will be Bar Mitzvah-ed in Orlando (and she so wanted to be there, the youngest son of her youngest child) and I just feel...

...listless.

I don't consider myself someone who dwells, or who self-pities. If I do these things, I do them privately. I don't ask for help, I don't particularly like to burden others with this, but I just need to get this out, and I have no one with whom to speak. My father says the same thing I say: "Life goes on." Well if life goes on why do I think about my grandparents all the time? Am I expecting to heal too quickly? Did I rush through the supposed mourning process? Or am I simply feeling their absence all the more sharply because I graduate in two weeks, and because they will not be there to see it?

My grandmother, the one who still lives, knows loss. She lost her father, suddenly, when she was sixteen. She has buried two sons. She has buried a husband. I do not know how she bears it, just as I do not know how my father withstood the loss of both of his parents with such dignity, and grace. My grandmother is something of a stoic, and my mother inherited that stoicism and I think I--at least in cases such as this--share a bit of that trait. It is easier to remain silent, and stone faced, rather than to sob, loudly, openly, in public. Easier to consider these thoughts alone, late at night, unaided, uncomforted.

I miss them. I miss them more than I ever thought possible. I look at their pictures, I move to call them, I want to tell them this is who I am, today, this is where I will be, and where I am going, but I cannot. They are truly gone, and I still don't understand what that means. How can someone just be torn from you, in that sense?

I had a conversation, several weeks ago, with someone dealing with their own emotional crises. And I told that individual that it is all right, life goes on, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger...the same platitudes that calm me, most nights, and that trick me into the fallacy that is my "acceptance" of my grandparents' deaths.

Sometimes it just is not all right. Even though it is the order of things: children and grandchildren bury grandparents, couples break up, things change, life moves on...sometimes it is just not all right. Sometimes one must realize that they are not whole anymore, that something is missing.

But then you turn off the lights, and go to sleep, and wake up the next day with what you have--that is, what they taught you, and the memories, and what remains. And you put on your face, and go through the day, because that is what we have to do--when a piece is missing, you do what you can to conceal the hole, and to get on with your existence.

Because life will go on, with or without you. And you might as well enjoy the ride.