*cover photo by Jordan Wozniak on Unsplash*
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Today was one of those days where I really just wanted to talk to my grandpa. He's been gone since September, a few days following his birthday. Whenever Stevie Wonder's “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer” plays, I try my best not to cry.
Inspired by the actions of one of my fellow Saddie Baddies calling up the auntie of their late mom, I called my grandpa's older sister. When it rang a few times before going to voicemail, I wondered if she'd known the number on her screen was mine. Or had she known it was me but assumed it was a butt dial. I was relieved when she called back.
I spent the next hour on the phone with her, she in Miami and I somewhere in Mexico at one of my favorite parks, surrounded by towering trees, a smattering of palms, and ones I don't know the name of. The trees transport me back to a place I know as home. I feel my grandpa's smile on my shoulder as the sun softly kisses my cheek.
From a young age, I've had this fear, or should I say, general dislike of death. I hadn't understood death as a natural part of life— a fate we'd all meet at our appointed times. Cemeteries didn't make sense to me. Funerals felt like a morbid scene trapped inside a snow globe. Like someone was violently shaking us, yet we moved at a slug's pace. Grief trumps time.
Having lost my own folks and being faced with the constant collective grief multiplying, hungry for misery, I am trying to sit with death. To let it teach me. If not how to die, how to live.
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