My First Grief Teachers
When I first started thinking about my first grief teachers, I thought immediately of Cassie.
She is the first person I remember losing. The first death I remember understanding as a loss.
The more I sit with that, though, the less certain I am that she was my first grief teacher.
I think grief had already found me.
I was five when my parents divorced. It was tumultuous and chaotic and traumatic. At one point, my dad kidnapped us. After that, he moved about eight hours away, and we went from seeing him every week to, as best as I can remember, not seeing him for almost a year.
I don't think five-year-old me understood divorce as the loss of a family structure. I didn't have language like that.
I understood that I had lost my dad.
And I had lost my home.
The house where I was a baby. Where I took my first steps. Where I learned to swim and rode a bicycle for the first time. Where I sucked on honeysuckle. Where my cat ran away.
So many of my firsts happened there.
And suddenly it wasn't mine anymore.
My dad wasn't dead. He was still somewhere in the world. But he was gone.
In some ways, he never really came back.
He was grieving, too. The loss of his marriage. The life he thought he would have. Whatever he imagined his future would look like. He fell into a depression and a steady stream of anger and resentment. He stopped taking care of himself. He stopped showing up for us, even a little bit.
The father I had known before all of that never really returned.
I think I was learning something about grief before I even knew the word for it.
Things can change.
People can leave.
A place can still exist and no longer be your home.
Someone can still be alive and be gone.
And then Cassie died.
When I think about Cassie now, I don't immediately think about leukemia.
I think about bubble gum.
We're outside. It must be late in the day because everything is shaded and cool. There's a breeze, but the ground is still warm. I can feel the cool grass underneath my legs. I'm wearing blue overalls with a rainbow-striped shirt underneath.
Cassie is teaching me how to blow a bubble.
I am terrible at it.
There is gum everywhere. All over my face. I'm completely uncoordinated and completely determined. She's trying to coach me while also trying not to laugh at me.
Eventually we're both laughing.
I can still hear her laugh.
There is something extraordinary about being very little and having an adult give you their full attention. To sit with you and patiently teach you something utterly insignificant. To be interested in whether you can blow a bubble with bubble gum.
It makes you feel like the most special kid on earth.
Cassie gave me that.
Later, she gave me something else.
She let me see her die.
Not intentionally, of course. But I was invited into what was happening. I visited her in the hospital. I talked to her. I watched her illness unfold over time. I remember orange cream push-up pops.
Her dying wasn't hidden from me because I was a child.
And neither was the grief that followed.
Her parents, Billie and Lou, were like another set of grandparents to me. They were devastated. Especially Billie. Cassie was their only daughter.
For a while, they disappeared.
I believe they traveled. They needed to leave San Diego, to leave their house and their town and the places where their daughter was supposed to be. Even as a child, I think I understood something about that. They were so sad that they needed to go somewhere else for a while and figure out how to exist in a world without her.
But they came back.
That's important.
They came back still grieving.
Billie still cried. They still missed Cassie. Time hadn't repaired what happened or returned life to normal. But they could talk about her. They could show up for us. Cassie could still be named.
I think they were the first people who taught me that grief was allowed.
That you could leave for a while if you needed to.
That you didn't have to go back to normal, because there was no normal to go back to.
And that you could eventually find your way back to other people without leaving the person who died behind.
My dad disappeared into grief and, in many ways, never returned.
Billie and Lou disappeared into grief and eventually came home.
At five years old, I was watching people answer the same impossible question in very different ways:
What happens to us when we lose someone we love?
Learning by Watching
The strange thing is that I don't remember adults talking to me about any of this.
Death wasn't discussed in my family.
It wasn't forbidden. It wasn't frightening. It wasn't even particularly negative.
It was just absent.
When my great-grandmother died, I remember hearing about it more than I remember anyone talking to me about it. I don't remember being invited into that grief in the way I had been with Cassie.
But my mom never made her disappear.
We could still talk about Great-Grandma.
Years later, when my grandfather died, it was something like: Grandpa died. Do you want to go to the funeral?
And that was about it.
There was just this void where conversations about death might have been.
But there is a difference, I realize now, between not knowing how to talk about death and making the dead unspeakable.
My mom has never asked me to stop talking about the people we've lost.
She never told me not to talk about my dad.
Now that my grandmother is gone, we talk about her, too.
My mom listens.
We tell stories.
We laugh.
We cry.
We grieve.
She is still teaching me that remembering doesn't have to happen alone.
So I learned by watching.
Maybe that's what our grief teachers do.
They don't necessarily sit us down and explain grief.
They show us.
And I'm still watching.
Since my uncle died, I've watched my aunt grieve him immensely.
She hasn't hidden it.
She hasn't made it pretty.
I've watched her let grief move through her when it is ugly and messy. I've watched her live through days when she still doesn't want to get out of bed.
She hasn't pretended that enough time has passed that she should be okay now.
There is something important in that, too.
She is teaching me that grief doesn't need to be made palatable for other people.
That sometimes grief looks like telling stories and laughing.
Sometimes it looks like crying together.
And sometimes it looks like not wanting to get out of bed.
I've never really been afraid of death.
Even when I was young, it seemed obvious to me that we are all going to die. It is our universal commonality. We are born, and we will die.
The part that frightens me isn't death.
It's forgetting.
The Mundane Things
I worry about forgetting the sound of my grandmother's voice.
The way she'd answer the phone.
“Hullo?”
And I'd say, “Hullo?”
And then we’d giggle and say, “Hi.”
We'd talk about politics and religion and life. She'd ask about my love life. I'd sometimes end a sentence in just the right way because I knew it would make her curious.
She'd pause.
“Hmm.”
I miss that sound.
I miss the way she thought.
I worry about forgetting my other grandmother's kisses on my cheeks. The touch of her hand.
I want to remember the apron she wore when she cooked. The smell of her house. The way she always burned the garlic bread for Sunday lunch because she had forgotten about it. How she looked sitting on the couch at night, reading the newspaper and watching television. The way she and my grandfather would yell at each other and bicker about absolute nonsense.
I want to remember her tending her tomatoes and hanging clothes on the clothesline.
I want to remember her yelling at me: “Put your socks on!”
You couldn't walk around without socks. You couldn't go to bed without socks. Apparently exposed feet were a direct route to illness.
I miss her pancakes. Only two other people in my life have made them the way she did.
I tried very hard to outstubborn that woman.
She outstubborned me.
I want to remember sitting with her at the kitchen table with most of the lights off because we needed to save electricity. She'd read the newspaper. I'd snack on something. We'd fold towels or talk about whatever was happening around town.
Nothing important.
Everything important.
That's what I worry about losing.
The mundane things.
I worry about forgetting Jax.
Not that I had a dog named Jax. I won't forget that.
I worry about forgetting what it felt like to be loved by him.
The look on his face when I'd show up to get him from the groomer or doggy daycare or after he'd been staying with my sister.
That particular expression that said, unmistakably, There you are. You are mine.
I worry about forgetting addresses.
My grandmother doesn't live in her house anymore. We sold it. I will never need that address again.
So why does the possibility of forgetting it bother me?
There is absolutely no practical reason my brain needs to keep that information.
But I want it.
My dad's phone number is still in my head.
I wonder sometimes if I'll forget it.
I don't need it.
There is nowhere for that number to take me now.
But once, those numbers could reach my dad.
And somehow that makes them feel important enough to keep.
What Remains
I'm more afraid of what I'll remember about my dad.
I worry that the difficult years will eventually swallow everything that came before them.
I worry that the images of him at the end will replace the others. He had stopped eating. He didn't look like himself anymore.
My grandmother didn't either.
I don't want those final images to become them.
I want to remember them full of life.
Round and fluffy and human.
And with my dad, I want to remember that he wasn't all bad.
That's complicated to say.
There were things he did that hurt me. Ways he didn't show up. Ways his grief and depression consumed him. He could be manipulative.
And there were moments when I was content with him.
There were moments I enjoyed my dad.
I don't want the ending to rewrite the whole story.
Maybe remembering someone honestly means refusing to make them simpler after they die.
My dad was really smart.
I'm really smart.
He loved to read.
I love to read.
He taught me how to drift in Mario Kart. I will forever know how to do that.
Those things are part of him that exist in me now.
And there are other parts.
Shadow parts.
My dad could manipulate people. I worry about that part of myself. I see it come out sometimes, and when I recognize it, I feel icky.
He isolated.
I know how to isolate.
He didn't ask much of other people.
I know that instinct, too.
Those are things I carry from him, although “carry” doesn't quite feel like the right word.
I've written before about grief as a backpack. The things we accumulate and carry with us.
This feels different.
These things aren't in the backpack.
They're integrated into me.
Maybe that's what my grief teachers have been teaching me all along.
Not only how to lose.
How to become.
The people we love change us.
Sometimes beautifully.
Sometimes painfully.
Usually both.
My grandmother's stubbornness is in me.
My dad's intellect is in me. So is some of his darkness.
The people who paid attention to me taught me how it feels to be seen.
The people who disappeared taught me what absence feels like.
The people who came back taught me that grief can alter a life without ending it.
My mom is reminding me to keep saying their names.
My aunt is teaching me that grief doesn't need to be hidden just because it makes other people uncomfortable.
The people who couldn't come back taught me something, too.
And now I get to decide what I do with what they left behind.
I can love the parts of myself that came from my dad without pretending that everything he gave me was good.
I can notice the shadow parts without pretending they aren't there.
I can recognize an impulse toward manipulation and choose something different.
I can notice when solitude is becoming isolation.
I can learn to ask something of other people.
Death ended my dad's opportunity to change those things.
It didn't end mine.
I still want the details, though.
I want the phone numbers and addresses.
I want the apron.
The tomatoes.
The socks.
The newspaper.
The sound of “Hullo?”
The little “Hmm.”
I want Cassie's laugh.
I want to feel the grass underneath my legs and remember what it was like to be four years old with bubble gum stuck all over my face while someone I loved patiently tried to teach me how to blow a bubble.
I want the look on Jax's face when I came through the door.
I want all of it.
And I know I won't get to keep all of it.
Memory doesn't work that way.
Maybe someday I will forget my dad's phone number.
Maybe someday I won't be able to remember exactly how my grandmother's hand felt in mine.
Maybe an address that once meant grandma’s will disappear from my memory entirely.
That thought still breaks my heart.
But maybe remembering them was never going to mean preserving every piece of them perfectly.
Maybe remembering them also means noticing what remains.
The way I think.
The way I love.
The way I read.
The way I stubbornly refuse to put on my socks.
The parts of myself I'm proud of.
The parts I'm still working on.
The ways I show up.
The ways I disappear.
The things I'm learning to do differently.
My first grief teachers taught me that people can be here and then be gone.
But they weren't my last grief teachers.
My mom is still teaching me.
My aunt is still teaching me.
The people I've lost are still teaching me, too.
And somewhere along the way, I became a grief teacher, too.
I teach clients. Friends. Colleagues.
I sit with people while they learn that grief doesn't have to be hidden or hurried. That we can say their names. Tell their stories. Laugh and cry in the same conversation. Stay in bed when we need to. Come back when we can.
I teach people how to grieve well.
But none of those lessons started with me.
My first grief teachers taught me.
My mom is still teaching me.
My aunt is still teaching me.
The people I've lost are still teaching me, too.
And I'm still learning what it means to lose someone without losing all of them.
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