grief
Grief is weird. You would think that eventually you just learn to live with the numbness — but spoiler alert, you don’t. You still expect them to call and bullshit about whatever hot gossip is going around, to sit outside while they smoke a Marlboro, to go to the doctor with them.
It’ll be the middle of the day, a random Wednesday at work, when you can’t breathe because you’re suddenly fourteen again, sitting between your parents, your world coming to a screeching halt because two words were uttered.
Grandma died.
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It’s been nine years since I felt like the world stopped spinning for a second. It was Friday, and the kiddos were in bed, a half-assed English essay on Romeo and Juliet needed to be finished. But suddenly, the essay didn’t matter. Nothing in that moment mattered because my grandma was dead. I would never get to call her up after school, or go over to her home to work on homework while Law & Order reruns played on her tv, a pack of Ring Dings in her fridge and a half finished bottle of diet Sierra Mist sat on her kitchen table.
Gone were the days of sitting on the bench outside her apartment complex while she smoked a ciggie and gossiped with her posse. There would be no more Special Grandma Drinks, no more midnight snackies…in a matter of seconds it felt like everything I knew was flipped on its head.
All from those two words.
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I still remember how her perfume smells, how the first step into her apartment felt, being greeted with a mix of lemon Pledge and stale cigarette smoke. How she hugged you with everything in her being. The mix of hairspray and slightly burnt hair from her hot rollers. Standing in her bedroom while she went through her jewelry box. I still remember sitting on the floor of her bedroom when she lived with me, a fresh crackle coat manicure drying while she used cheetah printed curling rods to curl my hair because the foam rollers she had hurt my scalp.
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It doesn’t matter that I’m on the cusp of 24, because suddenly I’m ten years old, watching her do her makeup as she practically gives me a tutorial on how to do a full face of makeup, making sure to “always put a little white eyeshadow under your eyes because it helps to hide the dark circles and brightens up your eyes.” She gave me my first eyeshadow that day, a pallet with a dark metallic grey that I wore to my fifth grade moving up ceremony; the eyeshadow was the same color as my wedges.
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I look for her in every sunset, every crow that sits on top of the light poles in the parking lot at work, in every orange monarch butterfly that flies past me and lands on the hood of my car. Every pink set of nails I get, I see her nails that I just sloppily painted, but she didn’t even bat an eye.
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The day she died, I think a part of me died with her.
The sunset on her 67th birthday. December 13, 2020.