the wings that guide your broken flight
There was so much love here, it's impossible to believe that any amount of pain could ever override that. Yes, I sat beside her on the pink-and-white bed she'd had for thirty years and watched God slowly take her from me, I gripped her hand and detached my mind, I chose not to see that which at the time could not be believed, even though those images now flip themselves over and over again in the belly of my brain. But I laid beside her in that same bed as a baby, as a child, as an adolescent and an adult, spilling tears or getting back scratches or watching Wheel of Fortune, resting my head on her lap or learning how to pray the rosary or asking questions about our faith. We had a thousand conversations, and we read a million books, because she never told me "No", she never once said, "Not right now, I'll read to you later." I used to line up her porcelain dolls one by one at the edge of the bed, give each of them names and tell my grandmother all the stories the dolls couldn't tell us themselves. She listened attentively to every word that came out of my mouth, and she always remembered the things I said. I hope to God that I gave back to her even a fraction of what she gave to me.
Her death has been such a tremendous, profound loss in my life. I'm bawling as I write this, in a way that I haven't cried in months. I'm in a pain that doesn't always look or feel like pain but hurts nonetheless, and I feel it acutely in many waking moments. It's been 20 months since I lost her, and I've been floundering around in this life ever since. State to state, place to place, one man to the next but nothing is good enough. I feel homeless and heartless unless I am in my grandmother's now-mostly-empty, up-for-sale home, which is where I am tonight. It is senseless for me to be here, senseless for me to be in the state of Florida at all, and although it's long been time to leave I just can't seem to find my way back to where I'm supposed to be.
She cut my umbilical cord and released me into this world, raised me as her own for five loving years and remained my one true guiding light no matter how far she was out of sight. We had a bond that just wasn't typical, it came from such a higher, stronger place that it makes all earthly connections pale in comparison. She saved my baby teeth, my locks of hair, my baby jewelry, my Baptismal candle; she documented my every milestone in such a detailed way you'd have thought I was her firstborn, though obviously I wasn't. I wasn't even her first grandchild, yet somehow I was always hers, way more than I was my mother or my father's. I don't know how to end this. It's pitch black outside and I'm sitting on her patio listening to the torrential downpour of rain that is surrounding me; such an activity used to be one of our favorite things to do together. Recreating it makes me feel close to her, but at the same time it also makes her feel very, very far away.
Her death has been such a tremendous, profound loss in my life. I'm bawling as I write this, in a way that I haven't cried in months. I'm in a pain that doesn't always look or feel like pain but hurts nonetheless, and I feel it acutely in many waking moments. It's been 20 months since I lost her, and I've been floundering around in this life ever since. State to state, place to place, one man to the next but nothing is good enough. I feel homeless and heartless unless I am in my grandmother's now-mostly-empty, up-for-sale home, which is where I am tonight. It is senseless for me to be here, senseless for me to be in the state of Florida at all, and although it's long been time to leave I just can't seem to find my way back to where I'm supposed to be.
She cut my umbilical cord and released me into this world, raised me as her own for five loving years and remained my one true guiding light no matter how far she was out of sight. We had a bond that just wasn't typical, it came from such a higher, stronger place that it makes all earthly connections pale in comparison. She saved my baby teeth, my locks of hair, my baby jewelry, my Baptismal candle; she documented my every milestone in such a detailed way you'd have thought I was her firstborn, though obviously I wasn't. I wasn't even her first grandchild, yet somehow I was always hers, way more than I was my mother or my father's. I don't know how to end this. It's pitch black outside and I'm sitting on her patio listening to the torrential downpour of rain that is surrounding me; such an activity used to be one of our favorite things to do together. Recreating it makes me feel close to her, but at the same time it also makes her feel very, very far away.