Summary

The author reflects on the emotional impact of their maternal grandmother's death, which occurred on the same day as their mother's, and the subsequent mourning and regret over missed opportunities for final connections.

Abstract

The author is grappling with the loss of their maternal grandmother, who passed away on the same day as their mother did years prior, intensifying the sense of grief and regret. The coincidence of the timing of their deaths has left the author in a state of mourning, reflecting on missed chances to speak with their grandmother before her passing. The author recounts personal memories of their grandmother, including shared experiences and her endearing qualities. The loss has also disrupted the author's sleep patterns, leading to insomnia and an overactive mind filled with tasks related to the funeral and unanswered questions about their grandmother's life. Despite the emotional turmoil, the author acknowledges the temporary nature of this intense period of grief and the eventual return to normalcy.

Opinions

The author feels a profound sense of loss and regret, particularly for not making a final call to their grandmother.
There is a poignant observation about the cyclical nature of life and death, as both the author's mother and grandmother passed away on the same day.
The author holds themselves accountable for not visiting their mother when she requested, leading to a missed opportunity due to her sudden passing.
The author expresses a deep appreciation for their grandmother's qualities, such as her patience, humility, and affection.
The author is experiencing anxiety and insomnia due to the emotional weight of planning the funeral and dealing with the aftermath of the loss.
There is a recognition of the impermanence of the intense grief, with an understanding that sleep and a sense of normalcy will eventually return.

Another Loss

Mourning During the Early Morning Hours

On Monday morning my maternal grandmother passed away. Another branch pruned from my family tree. Another loss etched into my emotional calendar. A double dose of grieving.

I don’t know if her mind knew the significance of the date, but her heart must have indeed. For twelve years later — to the day — mother followed daughter in dying.

Both left life in the morning. Both in homes and neither in their own. How eerie, how cyclical, how jarring, that mother and daughter should die on the same day, though many years apart. A day of loss upon loss. A day of regretting and remembering: A call I sooner should have made. “Phone Grandma C.” on my to-do list for over a week. A call I tried to place for three days, each attempt met only with ringing. She wasn’t there. She wasn’t home. No one told me, but she’d been moved to someone else’s house.

Then came Monday’s call from Grandma F. explaining what had happened. She isn’t there or here now. Her lifeline has been disconnected. “Call Grandma C.,” an imperative I will never again accomplish. My monthly reminders to phone her have been deleted with grave gravity. My only connection to her now, a network of memories.

Another missed opportunity: speaking to her one more time, adding another I love you exchange to the mountainous pile. These are the sorts of regrets that sharpen grief’s teeth in the face of death.

It reminds me of the invitation to visit I didn’t take so many years ago. September eleventh still a sensitive wound, my mother had asked me to please come home. But I had other things I wanted to do, so I stalled. I promised to visit her the following week, but the following week we had her funeral.

Mourning stacked upon mourning. Loss pressing down upon loss. A day of double bereavement. Tears shed for two now. Feeling acutely the absence of my mother as we prepare to put her mother in the ground. It is odd how one death echoes another and makes it resound. How there can be such impeccable symmetry in life and death, joy and sorrow — like those who (having lived a long life) die on the day they were born.

My internal clock is broken. It keeps prematurely sounding the alarm. I would accept waking up at five or six, but it wakes me up at four or three — today, at two in the morning.

Anxiety inflames my chest like heartburn. I’m nervous like a novice about to perform. I am hyper-conscious of each concern and every worry, of each doubt, each unanswered question, each task that’s still left to be done.

I have been here before. I couldn’t sleep the whole week before my wedding. After the fire in our apartment, I had insomnia for half a month. And now, with this funeral that I’m co-planning, wakefulness is upon me nightly once more.

My thoughts and emotions are too over-stimulated. I can’t shut down. There’s nothing I can do at two or four in the morning, but that’s something my brain doesn’t seem to know. My mind is racing towards an unreachable destination. Perpetually planning, I keep adding to my list of things to do.

There’s a eulogy to write, lawyers and government entities to engage, bills to pay, decisions to make, all added to so many unanswered questions, and the biggest — ever-present and looming like Jack’s giant — whom can I trust?

All this and I’m still mourning — tears at the ready just waiting for orders to fall. All this and there’s a weight I’m carrying — the weight of a loved one who’s passed on.

I’ve been here before. In three days, I will read my third eulogy: mother, paternal grandfather, and soon maternal grandma. The third eulogy I’ll read, but the first I’m writing on my own.

And where do I begin? How do I, a writer, write this? There’s so much I don’t know. Who were my grandmother’s parents? Where did she go to school? What was her year of emigration? I don’t have a clue. I can talk about what I do remember, the Saturday nights watching Golden Girls, Amen!, Nurses, and 227. The Rice Krispies treats she’d make for me each week. The Scrabble games at which she’d sometimes cheat, though not always. Case in point, qi and jo are in the dictionary.

I remember her making porridge from scratch in the mornings. How tenderly she braided my hair. I remember how good her cooking was — before she stopped using salt after her high blood pressure scare. I remember her taking piano lessons later in life than most — butchering the simplest songs. At the time, I just wanted her to find the right notes and end my auditory suffering, but now I respect her effort.

She was patient and humble, well-travelled, and empty of vanity. Her teeth may have been false, but her smile was genuine. She had the softest hands — well-worn with age. And even though I was once a prolific bed-wetter, she never refused to sleep with me. And therein lis what I’ll remember most of all, reliably wrapped around us like a benevolent blanket, her affection — her sweet, soft love.

But right now, my internal clock is rebelling against me. I’m sleepy when I need to be awake, and awake when I desperately want to sleep. I’m under rested and over-thinking. But I’m too tired to write anything meaningful, too frazzled of mind to undertake the eulogy.

I’ve been here before. As are most things, this too I know is temporary. I will sleep soundly again. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe not for a while. In the meantime, the sun will rise to find me waiting for it to get up in the morning. In the meantime, my heart is heavy and my mind is full. Death is the sole task of the dying, but it leaves the living with so much to do.

Parts of this piece originally appeared on the blog Write Away as Another Loss and The Sun Will Rise.