a year and change

One year and 11 days ago, my grandmother died.

backlit on a balcony in Spain

I marked that anniversary privately, but not alone. I thought about it all day long: On the parkway, at an orchard, picking out pumpkins, reading bedtime books to my children.

But I didn’t talk about it because I don’t know what else there is to say.

Grief goes on and on, long after everyone has forgotten that you are grieving. I live every moment with it but I rarely give it words. I can still cry on command. I still reach for the phone to call her. I do not go more than an hour without thinking about her and my grandfather. I miss her so much that it has become a physical thing, an extra organ wedged into my abdomen, sucking up plasma and marrow with its never-ending ache.

I am giving it words here but I still have nothing to say. There is nothing new or unique about any of it.

Because: You carry this with you or you will, one day, carry this with you. Grief is a wound and none of us go unbruised.

A door in our basement started popping open by itself sometime in the months after she died. I close it whenever I descend the stairs, only to find it ajar the next time I return. I jiggle the doorknob and wait for the latch to click. I push against it to make sure it is firm in the frame. I linger there, one hand on the wood, waiting for a kickback that I still have never felt. Every time, it opens after I am gone.

The door is white and oddly wide, with a shiny brass knob. It leads to an L-shaped storage alcove that houses the water heater, the holiday decorations, and a wire shelving unit filled with tools and all of the other miscellaneous hardware of homeownership. Were he alive, this would be my grandfather’s domain. The door opens next to the small wine refrigerator, which my grandmother coveted even though she only ever drank boxed wine. All of this together has come to mean something to me, even though none of it, probably, means anything.

The last time I was heartbroken, my grandmother taught me to cross-stitch. I needed, at the time, to learn something new — something that did not relate to my failures, something constructive, something beyond the thousand knifepoint lessons that stab me every time I fall apart. She took me to her local craft store and helped me pick out supplies, and then she explained exactly what to do.

You start in the middle and work your way out. Each symbol has a meaning. It’s OK to rip it out and start over.

I do not remember why she taught me just then. I must have asked, but maybe she sensed what is only now taking shape for me, which is that the whole process of this — of carefully following a pattern in hopes of watching something beautiful and intricate take shape — was precisely what I needed.

I found her embroidery supplies when we cleaned out the storage locker at her apartment building — hoops, scraps of cloth, stray patterns, a magnifying glass on a string, packets of needles, a needle-threader strung on a green ribbon and tied to a tiny pair of embroidery scissors, and every single color of DMC embroidery floss, wound carefully on labeled bobbins in so many plastic boxes. When I was a kid she kept everything in a basket with a hinged lid, but now it was all jammed into a monogrammed L.L.Bean tote bag that I’d given her years before to carry her library books. It felt like a prepackaged memento, waiting there just for me.

I had not picked up an embroidery hoop in almost 10 years but I came back to it easily, and stitching is how I have spent most of my mornings this past year. I tuck into the couch and put on a terrible television show and let my mind wander while I stitch gifts for friends and snarky projects for myself. It has become a sort of ritual for me, a type of communion, a literal physical thread from me to my grandmother. I cherish it, though like everything it only leaves me with more questions. (Was she a fast stitcher? Did she prefer linen or aida? Why did she have every single color of floss (just in case, or because she used them all)? Who taught her? Why did she like it? When did she stop?)

Everything about everyone is fascinating, which we rarely realize until it’s too late.

Little things I think of often: The tiny painted portrait on the wall in the guest room. The patterned wallpaper that seemed to move if you let your eyes go just the right type of blurry. A cluster of baskets hanging from hooks by the staircase. The embroidered monograms on so many cashmere sweaters. Little white knobs on brown plantation shutters, a rope hammock strung between trees, the scratchy yellow chair in the basement. A smooth and spindly chair I left in a storage unit in Wisconsin just before everything went pear-shaped. How my grandmother’s favorite color was blue and her birthstone was sapphire, and how I will never know if one thing followed the other. The particular cool softness of her hands.

How I should have kept calling even after it became hard.

How I should have and should have and should have.

A year on I feel mostly the same, though objectively, on the whole, I am worse. I took better care of myself when Moll was alive. The past 12 months have been a series of emotional breakdowns of various sizes, broken up by ever-briefer periods of feeling OK-to-good. The loss of that love led to the loss of others. I have relived trauma. I have been forced to stand up for myself and to choose the better of so many bad options. I would like to say that I am doing my best, but I don’t think I am, or at least I hope I am not because I don’t want to think that this is my best. Maybe tomorrow, I think every night, but each time I know that tomorrow will be the same.

In this way, I have learned nothing.

It does not matter how I feel about the grief because I have no say in its presence, but if anyone asked I would say that I don’t mind it, really. It keeps me company. It hurts, but it helps, too. It is only a testament to the breadth of that love, which is still here with me, alive as a beating heart. I know they are there, too, in so many sunbeams and cardinals and crossword clues. I know they are here, beside me and inside of me. It is not good enough (nothing ever could be) but it is, literally, better than nothing.

How lucky I was, how lucky I am.

How lucky,
how lucky,
how lucky.