How to Mourn Your Grandmother
How to Mourn Your Grandmother
A Step By Step Guide to Weathering the Worst Year of Your Life
AUTHORS NOTE:
This first piece is a brutal spilling of my own guts, for better or for worse. Most of the work I release here will not be so violently personal, nor so unflattering. That said, I’d like for this publication to be a place of radical honesty for myself, and by extension I’m taking a moment now to suggest that anybody easily upset by discussions of grief, suicidal ideation and/or substance abuse find something lighter to read. Otherwise, carry on. Thank you.
For My Gran, Colleen, Emmy, John, Noah & Jake.
November 22nd, 2022. You get a phone call from your father, who informs you in the smallest voice you’ve ever heard him use that your grandmother, Anne MacLean (formerly Hyde) has passed after years of decline, just shy of her 86th birthday. She was a prima ballerina, a polyglot, a muse, a diehard protestant and a remarkable storyteller. She was one of the dearest people in the world to you, not only because she was unyieldingly peaceful and full of grace, but also because to look at her was to see a glimpse of what you could become — it had been said much of your life that the two of you, at any given age, could have passed for twins. 8 hours away, in your hometown, a small pocket of land in the Maritimes, the rest of your family embrace one another. They exchange tears, memories, sips off of each other’s beers.
You, however, crouch in an alleyway outside of the restaurant you chef at in Montreal’s Old Port. A rat skitters over the snow bathed in the light of a streetlamp. Your shoes are full of slush. You are 3 months shy of 20, and you are entirely alone. This is not a new feeling, but this time it feels new. You wipe your nose on the sleeve of your coat and go back to the kitchen to finish off the dinner rush. Black out.
DENIAL:
Come-to. It’s July. You work at a nicer restaurant now. You’ve been with your boyfriend for the better part of a year; everybody thinks he’s a very responsible choice. Your hair is bleached white. Everything is going pretty well.
But here’s the thing… you hate all of it.
Scratch that — your hair is fantastic. Otherwise, though, everything has become a monotonous grey mush. You are on autopilot with one great mission to speak of: in August, assuming you can pull a passport application together in time, you’ll trek to England to spread your Gran’s ashes in the seaside town where she was born, as she has yet to be properly memorialized. Inadvertently put all of your hope there, in that application. It makes everything else feel small, like stones pocketed to be skipped later on. These days, your massive dispassion feels so light in your hands that you’d swear it would float.
Keep your head down, do what you’re supposed to be doing.
But if you’re a chef, why don’t you like to cook anymore? If you love him, why doesn’t he make you laugh? Should any of that matter until you’ve put her to rest? Don’t be selfish.
ANGER:
On an otherwise normal day at work, have your wallet containing all of your ID stolen and immediately become very, very selfish. Quit your job. No — walk out. Get sick of being taken for granted. Wallow. Call in every single favor. Watch the cold sweat from your hands wrinkle the edges of the passport application, the health card application, the character reference form. Get turned away for filling things out too early, for being poor, for being an Anglophone in Quebec. Scream and cry in front of nearly every federal and provincial office in a 5-kilometre radius. Rant to anybody who will listen.
Injustice is rampant, your skin is breaking out again, and if you love him, then why does every word that comes out of his mouth lately piss you off?
Scramble all month until there are 48 hours left on the clock, and 5 character references left for the office to phone in before you can legally return to the place your family is from. Start grieving England pre-emptively.
Then, watch as something miraculous happens. Watch your friends — your beautiful friends who are the only exception to your newly birthed and bottomless wrath — band together and sit by their phones to provide that final, crucial bit of information to the passport office. One of them will take the call while dashing through an airport for her own flight overseas. One will take the call during his birthday celebration. They know how badly you need this.
Break up with the boyfriend. You miss laughing, and god, are your friends ever funny. Sleep with somebody hilarious, handsome and a little bit famous almost immediately, out of spite. Hold your new passport tightly and notice how it doesn’t wrinkle. Feel your anger shift from self-pitying to self-righteous; silently curse Quebec until it disappears beneath you.
BARGAINING:
Experience England identically to the last time you were here 13 years ago. You were only 7 at the time, but it’s just as you remember it — charming, whimsical, wholesome. Of course a place like this would have brought about a person like her.
Of course, you say to yourself, I’ve come home.
As you tour through her hometown (Wirral, for the curious), allow everything to become a tool on a fool’s errand to find her. Had she ever eaten here? Gone to this church? Driven this road? It is a small town, so the constant and comforting answer is, probably. Chase her up hills and down valleys, by lush green and washed grey. Find her somewhere where the geese fly overhead in the shape of a perfect ‘A’, and there’s an impossibly placed leaning post perched over the water so that she can watch the tide come in and out forever. Just this once, pray to her god instead of yours. Hope she hears. Mark the spot.
Spend time with countless people who loved her. Hear over and over again that you are just like her — that you belong here.
Begin to wonder if maybe you could set the universe back to rights by bringing some symmetry to her journey. Begin to strategize and decide you never want to go back to Canada. Begin to wonder if you could stay here with all this beautiful family you didn’t know you had, with the culture, the nature, the art, the old friends who had the sense to move earlier (Hello, Mary Elizabeth), the wealth of love, and best of all, with her.
You cannot have her back, but just look how close you can get.
Return to the airport in a huff with strengthened resolve and a new mission. This is a temporary return. Curse Quebec a second time, but a little bit louder.
DEPRESSION:
Return to the office job you lined up for yourself before leaving to ensure you would not starve after abandoning kitchens, remember the cost of keeping yourself alive, and promptly lose all of your new resolve. England feels so far away now. Spend every spare second trying to escape again, only less productively. The call center might not be so bad if people didn’t make that face every time you mentioned it.
Clock their assessment of your wasted potential. Get scared.
Forget your ambitions to bring some level of realism to your fear. Maybe you were never like her. Maybe you never will be. Maybe, just maybe, you’re a white trash dropout destined for dead ends. It always occurred to you, but now it just feels honest.
Drink about it. Do drugs about it. Stop eating about it. Only date men who think you’re as replaceable as you’re afraid you are; who mirror your hurt and are constantly on the verge of disappearing from you, which means they remind you of most other things you’ve loved deeply. The sport of holding on to them keeps you going — you are a quickly thinning husk propelled by fumes of fleeting attention and a chilling fear that abandonment is a tiger at your bloody heels. You are so often cold these days.
Let bruises of unknown origin fill your limbs like passport stamps and try not to think about how long its been since you last saw your friends. They can’t see you like this. Be so glad that she can’t see you like this. Worry that maybe she can.
Feel the guilt for not feeling guilty in your empty stomach and your raw nose. Know that you are not a woman with an addictive personality, so know that this is something else. This is a war. A war between the part of you that thinks that if you go insane enough, you might catch her attention, so she’d have to come back and bring all the light and sense back to the world with her, and the part of you that knows barring that, there is a one way ticket straight to her that is burning a hole in your wallet through a tiny plastic bag. But look at you. No great loss. At this point, with what a shell you’ve become, who would even care if you-
ACCEPTANCE:
November 19th, 2023. Make nachos at the end of a three-day bender and be stopped cold in your tracks by your friends, who are now staging you an intervention. Never in a million years did you think you’d ever wind up being the sort of person who needed an intervention. Hear from people who love you, who miss you, who are so very sick of your shit. Cave, cry, tell them as many shameful things as you can stand for them to know, but keep a couple for yourself. Wait for them to leave so you can continue to implode. Feel awful when they don’t.
Have your entire understanding of what people are willing to do for you turned on its head. Feel your Gran in the room like she’s synonymous with forgiveness. Accept begrudgingly that you might be very lucky, very seen and very loved after all, and that sometimes people stay. Consider that a horrible year may not be a horrible life; that pessimism might actually be exhausting and that you may just be extremely tired.
Be a little bitter about it. Be extremely bitter about it. Take a look around at the pit you’ve spent all this time digging for yourself; at this pit you’ve fallen for as much as you’ve fallen into it. Spend the final days of this awful year mulling it over and taking notes so you can finally explain to the world where you went — where people go — and why this will be your last story from the bottom of the pit before you begin the long climb back up. Storytelling is what you’ll do to pass the time because you learned from the best. Hear the voices of your friends, calling you back to them, asking you to choose loving them over hating yourself… which makes it a pretty easy decision.
You’ll just have to catch Gran up on everything later.
— Liz
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What a lovely piece, so vulnerable and so much insight. Saying goodbye to people and pets we love is the hardest thing we humans have to do. You captured the messiness of grieving so well. Thanks for sharing.
Consider that a horrible year may not be a horrible life - words many could benefit from reminding themselves in bouts with "their pit"