About Grief Preview

Below is the first section of my essay "About Grief"

My grandma has been dead for one month. It’s my fault. At least I think it is. It’s been going around in my mind: If God is real, her death is His punishment for not believing in Him. It’s a long thought to be looped in my head. A stupid one, too. It doesn’t make sense, and yet, there it is, tormenting me.

My father called me the day before she died. He was in tears, sobbing into the phone as he said, “Grandma had a heart attack. She’s in the hospital. On life support.” 

I stared at the ground, at the strands of carpet, their depth and the way each of them twisted in the same direction and said, “Oh that’s awful.” It didn’t quite feel genuine, like how I didn’t quite feel sad. It felt like when grandma called me a few months ago and told me she accidentally overdosed on pain meds, but she was fine then. She was just in the hospital, it didn’t mean anything.

“She’s a strong woman, but pray for her,” he said.

“I will,” I lied. I knew it was a lie as I said it, felt the stutter in my heart, knew that prayer wouldn’t do anything because God was not real then. But He might be now.

My dad and I had a conversation once on our way home when I was still in high school where my atheism came up and my father was astonished. "You have to believe in God,” he had said, looking at me, wide eyed and mouth agape. I suppose it wasn’t something we really talked about before. I hadn’t believed in God in so long that I didn’t even think about it anymore. I just took the world as it was. 

“Well I don’t,” I had said.

“But you have to.”

“Why?”

I don’t recall his answer anymore, but I remember that it started with an exasperated “because” and some stuttered explanation I’d probably heard before. It had surprised me, though, that it mattered so much to him. He never went to church, never prayed. It didn’t surprise me so much during this conversation despite nothing changing over the years.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too.” I hung up.

Not too long after that, my cousin called. She told me grandma had a heart attack and was found on the floor of her room. She told me that our uncle was setting up a room for her in his house when she got out of the hospital. She said when. I felt relief.

I felt relief because grandma would have a place to go when she got out of the hospital. She had wanted to live by herself—she was never one to ask or accept help—and nobody else wanted her to live alone, so my family did their best to stop her. The issue is nobody told her that they didn’t want her to live alone, that they didn’t want to find her dead one day with no one around to help. Her health was already declining as it was (this was her third heart attack in 6 months I learned) and leaving her alone for her to take care of herself was not an option. But, like I said, nobody told her that. 

(It didn’t seem to matter anyway. She was home alone when she had that heart attack, my cousin was still twenty minutes away from the apartment when she checked the camera she kept in grandma’s room for just this occasion to find her lying on the floor, her dogs licking at her face, begging her to get up, get up please.)

So, when the rest of my family didn’t give her what she wanted—a co-sign on a loan for a trailer because her credit went to shit with all the reckless spending she did in the haze of her declining cognition—she came to me, desperate. I was at her apartment, of which she was being evicted from at the end of the month despite all the money I gave to her to pay her rent, in order to pick up some of the stuff I left there when I moved away for college, mostly clothes and stuffed animals I left in my room because I didn’t have enough space for it all before. I’d only lived in that apartment for two years, but I’d lived with her on and off my whole life. My dad had custody of me, so when he wasn’t in prison and he didn’t have an apartment of his own (which was often), I lived with my grandma. I looked at her, face sagging, body thinner than it had ever been before, and voice so, so quiet I could barely understand the words she was saying. She didn’t beg, just asked, told me no one else could or would, that I was the only one she could go to now as much as she didn’t want to, never wanted to.

I was hesitant; I’m a college student (notoriously broke) whom she already owed money to, and if anything happened, I would be left with her loan to pay along with my student ones.

But she was my grandma, and she was desperate and stressed and wanted space. I couldn’t deny her forever. I called the place she was getting the loan from and gave them my banking information so they could check my credit to see if I qualified. The next week, grandma was in the hospital with a place to go when she got out and I didn’t have to worry about co-signing anymore.

The next day she was dead.

Check out the interview on this piece here!