It’s January 13th. Friday the 13th, in fact. That means it’s been just about a year – time is fuzzy so I don’t remember the exact date – since I found out that my cousin Jamie was very ill. Seriously ill. Terminally ill, as it turns out. I know it’s been almost a year because her birthday is in two weeks, and for some reason, the only text preserved in our text thread is the last one I sent her. A message on her 35th birthday, telling her I loved her and was so glad she was still here. We didn’t know yet that she wouldn’t make it. That that would be the last text that I would send her, and that I would never get a text back.
The hows and whys and wheres and whens of her death mean less to me than the fact of it. This is grief like I’ve never known it. Burying a parent, burying a grandparent, feels like it follows a normal, if heartbreaking, sequence of events we’ll all experience in our lives. Some of us sooner than we should. Jamie is the first family member of my own generation who’s died. And she was part of me. So the grief is different. It’s too big to be able to see, to get my arms around so I can hold it close and comfort myself with it, the way I did when my grandma died when I was twenty. It’s come too early for me to be able to see it as the culmination of a long life well lived. And it’s erratic. It doesn’t ever go away, but sometimes it feels like it retreats to the part of my soul where I know it will live until the day I die. Other days it comes out and sits so heavy I can’t cry, like on days when the gray sky and cold air remind me we’re approaching the date. Sometimes it gets itself behind every other feeling I’m able to muster and pokes at them. I lash out in anger or irritation or sadness at the people I love before I realize I’m turning outward what I can’t hold in anymore, and then I dig out the grief and set it in the light until it burns away. And sometimes it comes roaring to the surface, so fast and so hard that all I can do is open my mouth and weep. And the crying isn’t always the same. Sometimes it’s quiet tears rolling down my face. Sometimes it’s a hard, quick sob – the emotional equivalent of punching the wall a few times. And sometimes it’s a wave of water, pouring out and out and out, so fast and so much that I think I might drown. That I think I want to drown in it. But I never do, and I come out on the other side having to wring my soul out like a soaked rag, which must be why I feel so tired after. I never know which grief it will be, or what will set it off. Gray sky, cold wind, bell-bottomed pants at Target, drinking a bottled Frappuccino under my Christmas tree on the first Christmas Eve without her.
There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. It’s not lessening. The anxiety of not knowing when and how her life would end has been replaced by the cold truth that is has. And there’s no end to that fact. It’s a fact forever that my cousin died, went somewhere that, for the first time in my life, I couldn’t follow her. And that forever fact has become my forever grief. I’m trying to teach myself that the trick is to remember it won’t end. I’m trying to learn that I’ll never not look at the door at my aunt’s house to see if she’s the one opening it. I’ll never not feel like she’s missing. I’ll always be waiting for her, even though I know all I have left is the grief. The grief will always be there. I’ll just carry it differently. It helps to have someone else carry it with you sometimes.
I don’t know what I’ll do on her birthday. It’s exactly six weeks before mine, and is therefore one of the markers in my year. End of January, looking toward spring, six weeks until my birthday when we can really start to expect it in Michigan. Maybe I’ll cry. Maybe I’ll drink a Frappuccino. Maybe I’ll put on the music we loved when we were 15 and dance in my living alone with the lights off. Maybe I’ll sit on the floor with crystals in my hand and grief in my chest and see what comes out. Maybe I won’t do anything at all. I don’t know. All I know is that I’ll be doing it without her, and that fact never dies.
Nothing Down the Drain 