Grief and Mourning

I've never learned how to gracefully lose someone. Maybe that's some kind of oxymoron. Maybe there's no delicate way to grieve.

Any of you that actually spend the time it takes to read these bullshit, melodramatic posts know that I lost my grandfather in September. You know that I worshiped him more devoutly than some people ever worship their God. He was invincible, immortal to me. And then, he took us all aside for a family meeting last July, the tenth, to be exact.

"I've been holdin' off tellin' y'all this for a while now. I've been diagnosed with Leukemia." he said. The silence that fell on the room was as dense and cold as fog.

Then it broke.

Tears fell like rain all around. My mother and sister were sitting on the couch across the room from me. They clung to each other fiercely, like they were drowning. My grandmother just looked at him in shock, her mouth a bit slack. My uncle stood and rushed out of the room. His wife looked at my grandfather and said, in complete disbelief:

"That's why you were asking so much about my mother." or something along those lines. I wanted her to be quiet. My world was ending. She didn't have any place to talk.

I couldn't cry, however. I had to be strong for him. He couldn't see me cry. Not when I could see the deep creases at the corner of his eye filling with tears. That doesn't mean that my own tears weren't sliding down my face, stealing away from my eyes. I smudged them away as quickly as I could with the back of my hand. Then, I watched him blot at the trapped tears on his own face with a wad of tissues, as casually as if he just had a speck of ash in his eye.

He then told us that he had known about it for over a year, since the previous April. He said that he didn't want us to do anything differently, to not worry about him, that he was going to go back to work for as long as he could.

The world swirled around me in vivid splashes of color that hurt me, in hazes of black and grey that brought numbness and the comfort of nothingness. I could only hear his voice, hear the unspoken fact that he was going to die and leave us. That my God was falling from his place and becoming a mere mortal.

At some point, I realized that my sister, my uncle, and my grandmother were all sitting around me in my chair beside him. It's a large white chair, part of the set that my great-grandmother had in the house when I was in junior high. I had my legs curled under myself, leaning on the left arm of it, leaning toward him. My sister was sitting in front of me, curled around me. My grandmother was sitting next to her, her arms around both of us. My uncle was on the floor in front of me, leaning back and I had a hand on his shoulder. My grandfather looked over at me, trying to comfort the three of them simultaneously. He nodded a little, just once. The look said that I had it handled and he trusted me to be able to take care of them.

That look, more than anything else that he had said that night, cracked my soul. I had been devastated before, but that look made me bleed. I just met his eyes and put on my bravest face. I couldn't disappoint him, and I couldn't hurt him more than he was already hurting. No one wants to make their entire family cry because they're dying. No one wants to be there when people start mourning over them.

I realized today that I felt safe when he was alive, even after I realized that he wasn't infallible. There was just some kind of inner security that I felt. And now, I can really only get that feeling when I'm surrounded by my closest friends and I have some sort of physical contact with them. When I don't, I feel vulnerable and fragile and alone. Even when I'm in the same room with them. It doesn't matter where I am, or what I'm doing. I feel vulnerable, fragile, alone. And I hate it. I should be able to take care of myself, should be able to hold myself together better than this. I'm capable. I'm not weak. I'm not a victim in any sense of the word and there's no one on the planet that can make me into one. But I just feel so vulnerable now that he's gone.

I've never felt vulnerable before. Ever. Not a single moment in my life. And now, this is crushing me. It's hard for me to deal with because I've always been taught to be strong. It's really hard to be both strong and vulnerable. It might even be impossible.

And I'm just going to have to learn how to deal with it, because this is life and it's not easy.