The Ubiquity of Grief - Part I

If you know me even relatively well, you know I’ve recently suffered a difficult loss in my life. Because this loss has been such a formative and impactful moment in my life, I will have a lot to explore and think about in regards to it.

I do know that since this loss I have become so much more aware of grief and how it encompasses every emotion and every moment in some way or another. Grief takes so many forms, but the apex of it lives in the death of a loved one.

I had mused early last year that I had been lucky to that point that I hadn’t lost anyone extremely close to me in my life. I have all of my parents, my siblings, my best friends both current and past, and a really large majority of my extended and in-law families still around. Back in 2017, I had lost a grandmother (on my step-dad’s side) that lived with me much of my young life, but she had lived a long and fruitful life and her passing was more a celebration and appreciation. While there was a void left behind, the time she had spent here with us had felt full, I didn’t feel like there was anything we had missed out on.

Come to think of it, I did have a mentor who passed shortly after I graduated high school. That was formative back then, but also felt so connected to a past I have long since left behind. It’s crazy to think that was more than 10 years ago now.

My point is that around this time last year, I had felt relatively unscathed by the permanence of death. All the death I had dealt with to that point was understandable and I could be at peace with it. I only had the fear of losing loved ones back then: I have five kids, I cannot bear the thought of any of them leaving before me. My wife is as essential of a person I have ever had in my life. My mother is my hero and someone I both prepare to live without and cannot bear to live without, and everyone else in my life feels like a fixture that I’m not eager to see removed.

A few months later, in June, my grandmother on my dad’s side passed away from cancer. I remember feeling so frustrated at my lack of outward emotion. I felt so much guilt in her death. Though she too had lived a relatively full life, she still felt so vibrant and young only months prior. My last view of her was in a hospital bed over Facetime, barely able to speak because her throat was so sore. I told her I loved her but not in the sweeping, heartfelt way I imagined. We blew each other kisses and my aunt ended the call. The next day she was gone. She was the first person of whom I felt an absence. I thought of her worries and her cooking and her laugh. The way she made things with her hands and had a folksy way of judging but also staying optimistic about everyone. She loved being a grandma and she loved being a great-grandma. I’m glad I was the first of her grandchildren to do that for her. She was also so proud of me and, unlike my dad, that meant something.

I didn’t tell my kids for a while about it. Covid had upended everything and I just didn’t want to add to it. We had a beautiful visit with her earlier that year and she gave each of the girls an ornament she made as a keepsake. We had as perfect a last family gathering as you could hope for, just weeks before Covid really shut everything down. When I did tell the girls, they cried. To them, she was just pure happiness and sweetness. That’s what she was to me too, even when I was annoyed with how much she worried about everything.

In that moment grief felt like a mix of love, sadness, guilt, and regret. I didn’t really talk to her after she left, but I thought about her a lot. I’ve long moved past the moments that I feel drew a line between childhood and adulthood (I am 32-years-old, on my second marriage, and with 5 kids, after all), but this was a loss of someone I knew my entire life, which was new for me. My memories of her flashed between my childhood searching for easter eggs in her yard to my own children doing the same. It’s hard not to feel the significance of that.

At that time I thought that would be my greatest test of grief, but I was in for a really unwelcome surprise.

To be continued…