Grief is an awfully interesting thing. My grandma died today. Or yesterday. The date is today, but it happened in another country. I heard about it right before going to bed. I didn’t sleep well.
Yet, I went to work. As much as I could, I work remotely. My grandma was 102. She has had several hail Mary’s in the past two years. Doctors have put her on palliative care several times now. She pulled through when they thought she had no chance.
I think I was half in the mind that she’d continue to pull miracles. I think the other half was telling myself that I was ready for this. I don’t think you’re ever ready for it.
When my other grandma died, nobody expected it. It happened one night. She didn’t wake up. I remember what I was doing and how I reacted. In short, I didn’t. It took me years to move past the shock. And I’m still grieving that. Did I experience the whole gamut of emotions? I’m not sure.
In a perverse way, this feels right on theme with my previous post. Emotions are weird. Now that I’ve been treating my ADHD, I recognize more of my internal processes. Including emotions. Yet, I don’t know the emotions. They’re unfamiliars invading my body. I don’t know what they are. But they’re there. There are big feelings lurking.
Both of my grandmas were dear to me. In more ways than one, they raised me. I was a sickly child, and my parents often had me stay with my grandma when I was ill. Other times, they would be busy working and leave my brother and I with my grandma. We spent a lot of time together. As a kid, I spent my vulnerable moments with them. And now they’re both gone. Woof.
The emotions haven’t come; yet. I struggled working today. Functioning at 40-50% capacity, I got somethings done. Had I hoped that work would distract me? It did not. Intellectualizing this did not work. After all, you cannot logic away emotions. They’re separate processes. Emotions are beyond my control.
This is a commingling of two metaphors, but I’ll go ahead anyway. The first part is a bit from The Good Place, Chidi says
“Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it: its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And… it’s there. You can see it. You know what it is. It’s a wave.
“And then it crashes on the shore, and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be… for a little while. That’s one conception of death, for a Buddhist. The wave returns to the ocean. Where it came from. Where it’s supposed to be.”
The second part is the wave as a metaphor for the emotions and their intensity. This was from a reddit post my friend shared to me. 1
In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don't even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you'll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what's going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything...and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.
But for me they’re both the same. My grandma exists as the waves now.
In becoming one with the ocean, she’s at the shore. And that’s what I feel. It’s intense. I like what the reddit post said about the intensity of the feelings as a reflection of the relationship. Perhaps.
And maybe that’s why the waves are intense.
One day I will return to the ocean too, and I will also become a wave that slowly disappears into the ocean.
But it’s not my time.
And , ll I can do is brace for the waves and focus to stay afloat.
And live in the moments between the waves.
Always knowing that the wave will come.
Because she is no longer here.
And she exists in our memories and emotions.
It is shocking to me that in the grand scheme of things, two or three generations is all it takes for that memory and emotions to disappear. I don’t know my great grandparents, much less my great great grandparents. And the newer generations won’t mourn my grandma. Because they never knew her. It is humbling that in two or three generations, my memory will extinguish also.
In that sense, I should be fortunate that I can remember, grieve, and mourn my grandma. Because as long as I do that, she exists somewhere.
Or something like that.