Tuesday: Writing

Okay, so I lied, and here I am.

Last Tuesday I awoke at 4:30 in the morning to what might have been a knock at my door. I was not sure if indeed I had heard a knock, and I heard nothing else, so I will never be sure.

Later that night, around 10:00, I stepped out of The Smell to find a missed call from my father. I knew why he was calling, and he confirmed it to me over the phone.

My grandmother had passed away.

Caught between a language barrier and a cultural barrier, I never really knew her.

She had been slowly dying for the past two years, her diabetes claiming one part and then another part of her, and as each organ failed, a small piece of her soul seemed to die with it. Finally she was no longer the woman who fled Cuba with her family to live in America, she was a withered husk, a deflated shell.

They had increased her morphine dose. She felt no pain. It was a relief.

Today they buried her and I felt myself move into a new realm of life. I spoke because I felt it would be wrong otherwise, but when I went to devise the words, I realized I had nothing to say. I feel the regret inside of me though I know I cannot blame myself.

I looked at my family beside me, drawn together for support, for once no longer the individuals who often hotheadedly bicker, but one unit falling onto each other's shoulders in a circle of strength. I suddenly understood what "family" means.

And maybe I had been selfishly ignorant, but I could see the gift now before me, and I would not be thankless again. When I think about my family now, I will think about this day, and I will think about how I learned a new meaning for "love."

I knew just what to say.

When the tractor bulldozered the dirt into the hole, it was a jarring return to reality, as if snapped from a drowsy waking dream. My mother leaned in to whisper, "I wonder how you will write about this."

At dinner I sat across from my grandfather, unable to say the things I wanted to say. My heart breaks the most for him. When I was with Samuel I had wanted to grow old with him, and I truly believed it had already been written in the stars. Without him now it is as if he has died, and if the grief I have endured is the result of four years of companionship, I cannot imagine the grief of an entire lifetime. I think of my own nights crying, sometimes screaming, into a darkness, and I wonder about the horror his nights have been and are about to be. I have peered into that void, I have lost a thing most precious, I have waken from nightmares crying in vain for someone to hold me. I have struggled to fall back into dreams of him, chasing him through the fields of slumber.

Change has been vibrating in the air for some time now, but today it reached its zenith.

In my magically realistic world I imagine the knock at my door was my grandmother, passing through to rouse me to the tremendous change that is about to be delivered, as she made her journey between realms, transformed, herself, into something glorious.

Writing August 11 2009