She Knew

I’ve only lost two loved ones in my life so far, three if you count my family’s dog, Ranger. Baba, my grandpa, was the first, and definitely a hard one. Even though he had lived a long life, battling diseases and ailments like a champ, it didn’t feel like his time. I didn’t think it was his time. But over the course of that year, I slowly passed through those stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Even though I still miss him, especially when I’ll call my grandmother and his voice picks up on the answering machine, I can say with confidence that I understand he is physically gone from my life (though definitely not from my heart, I will always love and hold onto him). However, when my uncle passed away during the summer of 2014, it was like everything inside me froze solid. I remember crying initially, and during the days to come afterwards, but after a while, I really felt numb. I didn’t cry, I wouldn’t get sad when I thought about him. I would dream about him and wake up perfectly fine. That may have been because of my excessive marijuana use to cope, but either way, I knew I wasn’t healing with those stages. I was in a permanent state of denial, he didn’t feel dead to me, it didn’t feel like he was gone. I still had moments where when we would go out to my beach house – which was about 45 minutes from where he lived – I’d think we would be making an appearance to see him at some point. It’s hard to explain my thought process, but to try, it felt like his death was just something we all had imagined and that he was really still alive. I needed closure.

His death wasn’t sudden in the fact that he had been diagnosed with Stage IV stomach cancer – we knew this would someday result in his demise, even though my optimism kept fooling me into thinking he could triumph over it (as my optimism always overpowers my thought). His death was sudden because it happened so quickly and all at once. One moment we were crying over the fact of his terminal illness, and weeks later he was moved to hospice where he would die that same afternoon. It just didn’t feel like reality; maybe I had fallen asleep in my real life and woken up in a parallel universe where his death was inevitable. And because we never had a funeral for him after the fact – he wasn’t religious and it was not what he wanted – we never received closure that he was no longer with us.

Before he died, Uncle Harry told his daughter, my cousin, that he wanted to have a memorial service 6 months or so after his death, and this past summer in August, my cousin planned it. “This won’t be a funeral with tears and sadness,” I remember her explaining to us, “Harry wouldn’t have wanted that. This will be a celebration of his life – a big party to talk about the great man he was.” I didn’t know when it would happen, but I knew at some point during this celebration, I would cry. I would break down and realize his death fully, and I would lose it. Months of repressed feeling and dry eyes would culminate in this moment, and the four stages would all clump together at once.

As we sat around the patio, people one by one got up and spoke about funny memories they had of my uncle, the crazy antics this man – with round, silver glasses that pinched his nose – had done. And the best part was, I could imagine him doing all of it. Harry was always so goofy and could place a smile on anyone’s face with a simple joke or display. At Thanksgiving, he was the one to grab the big, metallic, turkey fork and pretend to pick his nose with it. He was also the one to encourage me to make fart sounds with my armpits, and when I finally mastered it when I was seven, he was the first to praise me. I looked around the backyard, hoping to see his salt and peppered hair amongst the crowd, hoping to smell the Marlboro cigarette he’d always have hanging out the side of his mouth. We weren’t telling these stories to remember him by, we were telling them because these hilarious anecdotes would soon make him jump up on stage to perform more of his comedic acts, right? Again, my fantasy of optimism had taken over and I had to return to reality. It was when his college buddy, Cleveland, came to the stage and started speaking about the things he and him used to get into that I realized he and Cleveland could never create more memories like those. They could no longer goof off with one another or talk about their college days, beers in hand. My body started trembling. It was when Cleveland said how much he missed him, how much he wished they could do one more crazy stunt, that I couldn’t contain it anymore. I stared at my hands with my blurred vision, trying to quiet my sobs while my brother’s fiancée briefly rubbed my back. After a few moments, another gentle hand was placed on my back, then arms wrapped around me in a tight hug and a face was placed adjacent to mine. I turned around and saw my mother behind me, a frown pressed firmly at her lips and her sunglasses covering her watery eyes. I remember feeling surprised but also extremely grateful that she had come all the way from across the patio to comfort me, that protective, maternal instinct when a mother realizes their child is in need. I hadn’t expected anyone to come to my aid as the people were talking about him, to come and make sure I was okay, I had tried to go unnoticed. But I was so happy she had noticed, that she knew, and that she was there for me without any hesitation – as I know she always will be – because I not only needed her in that moment, I needed that to begin my ascent into healing.