Journeying with Grief
This morning I woke to a thick white frost. As I peered out my window at the colouring sky, I was surprised by the marks left by my breath on the icy window pane. Outside, the grass looked splintered with tiny white shards of ice and the air hung crisp, fresh and electric.
Like most mornings, I had to drive my second eldest daughter to work in town for an early start at the cafe she has been employed at since she finished high school last year.
Walking past my the local grocery shop I spied some yellow and orange daffodil shaped jonquils along with my favourite cream coloured ones. Without hesitation I bought all of them. Hugging the bunches to my chest as I walk back to the car, breathing my dragon breath into the icy air, I ponder on the journey of grief that I am conscious of currently travelling.
I know I often talk about the journey of grief. The yearly migration through the mind moments and memories of the ones we are now living without. For me, I discovered grief rather early. I was 11 when my baby brother died. He was 16 days old and in that one night, where I got up to go to toilet and found my Grandma weeping silently in the lounge room, that I felt for the first time real body numbing fear.
She told me in the strongest and most compassionate voice she could summon to “ Go back to bed” it’s okay. Everything will be okay.” But I knew it was not okay, and as I peered out from behind my door frame I watched as she rocked and prayed with her rosary beads as the tears continued to fall. I didn’t know what was happening but I knew in that moment that life would never be quite the same for my little family on the hill.
In the weeks, months and years that followed, I struggled to understand the changes that were unmistakable in everyone I loved. Eyes that no longer sparkled when they smiled, more often than not red rimmed and blood shot. Adults whispering as we entered a room, moving apart and trying so hard to avoid making eye contact with me. A silence that seemed to envelope the house and the houses of our extended families. No one smiled and laughter was something that we did guiltily, not sure if it was allowed in this new space.
The little mimic in me who had always known how to act by looking to those around me didn’t understand. This emotion, grief as I came to know it, didn’t look the same for anyone. Some of my family showed anger, some showed sadness, some of them just changed, in that moment, it was like mum and dad just broke into a thousand tiny splintered pieces that my brothers and sisters and I would spend a life time trying to help them find and put back together. Most of my teenage years where navigated past islands of grief as friends and family members left this world and I tried to move forward without them.
I was 25 when my Grandfather died after a 6 month battle with cancer. He died at home which is where Grandma, his daughters and us older grandchildren had cared for him for the duration. His death was another that rocked me to the core. For most of the next 10 years I was helping my grandma navigate around the hole that Granddad absence had left in her life. Her grief was palpable, you could feel it like a weight when you entered her house. It hung around her shoulders like an oversized yoke and forced her to hunch over with the weight of the emotions she was carrying.
Today my grief is for Grandma. This time two years ago, we were taking it in turns to sit by her side so she could pass at home. We promised from the day she could not get out of bed, we would take turns to sit by her side through the days and nights, cuddled up under a blanket or dressing gown, either beside her on the bed or snuggled in the chair at that sat under the window at the foot of the bed.
Everyday I see something that reminds me of those precious few weeks when I could be there for my grandma in the same way she had always been their for me. The vases of jonquils we picked fresh from her garden each day and sat beside her bed, their perfume struggling to overpower the smell of death that was so heavy in the room even before she died. We pretended not to notice as we described the weather that she could no longer see through the window for herself or play her recordings of Granddad singing church hymns that tugged at ripped corners of our own hearts.
Last week I brought gladiolus because they reminded me of grandma today it’s jonquils. My guess is there will be more flowers to come in the next 10 days leading up to her two year anniversary. I miss her so much, I know she is still with me, every time my home phone rings, I have to remind myself it is not Grandma. I will never again answer the phone to her so she can check up on me and my kids and give me all the little suggestions she so often shared about parenting, life and keeping safe. Her love of colourful flowers and gardening though, that i can still fill my house with and i will.
Grief really is a journey, those yearly reminders can sneak up on you, and often the tears fall at the most surprising times. But the journey never really ends, we just get better at navigating it.