Grief like Water

like a lake and rain and river and ocean and always

Like a lake, only open sky. I can see the other side, or at least I know it’s there. Encapsulated in a way. I can float, I can stare at the stars or the wide blue sky.

Like rain, inescapable if it catches me, and manageable from the dry inside. I cannot make it stop.

Like the river, always going, I sit at its bank. I wade. There is so much unknown and it simply goes. If I am not careful, it will take me along.

Like an ocean, I cannot see the end, and I know one does not exist. Bowled over is the phrase that comes to mind. This is when I am doubled over in the kitchen, wet dough on my hands, and I want to run but there is nowhere to go. This is when I am grateful to be alone, this is when I am grateful I have a dishtowel. I can swim in the ocean too. And it’s full of life. And sea glass and stones. You asked Heidi and me to bring you back “maiden hair?” Virgin Mary's bedstraw? I can’t remember exactly, but you didn’t feel up to the beach walk that day, so we went alone with Bedstefar and we gathered things and rose hips. You wanted the grass for your schnapps, I don’t remember what it was or what it was supposed to do. There is so much I won’t remember, there is so much I won’t know. And it passes, and I finish the bread, and the focaccia, which feels like an insult. Your funeral is finishing, an ocean away, and you hate focaccia and I made it today for the first time. It was not intentional. I would say I’m sorry but I would put money on your laughter.

Like a puddle, I can step around, or walk through, or splash in. I can enjoy it for what it is. For what it brings me. As a sign of life, as a signal that love was here, as a gift and still.

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Reader, when I last wrote to you, I wrote about anticipatory grief. My grandmother was well, we had a Skype call scheduled the next day, I was reflecting. That week she fell, fracturing her spine, the next week she had a stroke, paired with more bleeding in the brain, the next she was gone. Family gathered together in her home and waited, and took turns keeping her company, she let them know she could hear them with a small hand squeeze or a gentle wave, she listened to classical music around the clock, my mother, who is a hospice nurse, was able to be her caretaker, and she passed with nothing left unsaid, quick enough to avoid suffering, long enough to say goodnight. It was a good death. It was an incredible life. I stayed in America.

The last time I spoke to her, my mother holding the phone to her ear, I told her I hope she sleeps well, has sweet dreams, and that I would see her at our regular call time on Monday. And I did, and have, and will do. We bake bread together, we cleaned the drying umbrella in preparation for spring, we had coffee and planted the last of the winter bulbs. We will knit and talk politics and I will tell her what I’m cooking later and all about my weekend. Her voice is so clear. Her hands, soft and almost translucent from her vitiligo, are so present in my vision. The gentle weight of them on my head as she says godnat og sov godt (goodnight and sleep well), I am sitting on her pink leather couch and staying up to finish just one more chapter.

In so many ways this is just a different type of long distance.

The waters continue.