Dealing with Grief.

I'm having trouble talking about it, so I tried writing about it instead.

trigger warning narrative-equivalent of listening to a lana song, as in do not read if you’re not in the mood to be depressed as hell.

A sketch I made of Monica (my mom) and Grandpa, based on a photograph taken on her wedding day.

The last thing my grandpa said was my mother’s name. He gasped it, the syllables struggling to climb up through his esophagus and past the tumor and onto his tongue and into the room. But I know I heard it. On the cathartic ride home from the hospital at 1 am, I stared ahead into the darkness as we rode over the Driscoll bridge and I spoke into the silence, “I don’t know if you’ll take any comfort in knowing this Ma, but if I’m not mistaken, I’m pretty sure that Grandpa’s last words were Monica.” There was a pregnant pause, just the sounds of tires on wet pavement, wind whooshing past the sideview mirrors, hot air blowing in from the fans on the dashboard, and both of us sniffling side by side in the silence.

“Sofia, I can’t believe you’re telling me this, because do you know, I thought I heard it too, but I thought I was going crazy.”

Our eyes met for a moment before hers flickered back to focus on the road. Her wet face captured the glowy light from the dashboard and turned all her features shades of blue and purple. The streetlights above us brightened and darkened them as if someone were toggling back and forth with the exposure.

“No I’m sure of it, mom. I know he said Monica,” I insisted. “He said it a couple of times, in fact. Back to back.”

She gasped. “He did, right?” she said, eyes widening and then crumpling, like a balloon inflating and deflating in the same breath. Between the strobing effect of the streetlights, and the purpley light from the dashboard, and the fact that we were both in the car alone together, after experiencing the same brain-bending traumatic event… the energy was like the two girls crying in a club bathroom who just met five minutes ago. But instead of one of us crying over a dumb guy, we were both crying over a really good one, stolen from both of us too soon, in more ways than one. And in a way I actually was meeting my mom for the first time—this new version of her, who didn’t have a dad anymore, as of just an hour ago, and would never be the same because of it.

“I knew it,” she said, and I could hear the tears rising in her throat now. I could hear them bending her words, forming wobbly syllables. I could feel them in mine too, just sitting there and rising slowly, like warm murky water rising from the bottom of a dark well.

---

My grandpa was gentile, humble, and kind—such a rare find, in today’s god-awful dating climate.

It feels very weird and unfathomably sad, by the way, to say “was”— to speak about him in the past tense already, knowing that if I were to have written this ten days ago, I’d be speaking about him in the present.

He had big whitish-blue eyes, like pearls. The last conversation I had with him was a few weeks before he died. I knew he was dying. I spent a whole Sunday in the hospital, sitting beside him for hours while he asked me about work. He listened intently as I spoke. Underneath his blanket in his hospital bed he looked like a croissant wrapped in tissue paper, tiny and delicate, bending in my direction to listen while I told him about my recent adventures. He was so attentive, so invested in my every word, that his eyes almost seemed to be reaching towards me, like a snail’s.

This is a compliment, by the way. I love snails. I think that their bulbous, retractable eyes are adorable and very cool. Like what other animal has eyes on stilts? None that I can think of.

I had just returned from an insane pinch-me press trip in California, and Grandpa wanted to know all about it. I wanted to ask him more about himself instead, but I knew he wasn’t feeling his best, so I figured I’d just let myself talk about the trip until he seemed sick-and-tired of hearing about it. Although, he seemed genuinely interested the whole time. He asked me to see pictures, and as I showed them to him, flipping through them, my heart tugged at my throat watching him shuffling through all of his famous expressions. There was his surprised & impressed look, where he drew in his chin and widened his eyes and raised his eyebrows. A classic. And there was his admiration look, which was the surprised & impressed look combined with a faint “shoo” sound, his equivalent of “wow”, or the gen-z “sheesh”. Every once in a while there was the whaaa? look, which was pretty much the surprised & impressed look, but happening at 10x speed, all of his features bouncing into place, his eyes the widest of all. He would usually save his energy for the whaaa look, and only tended to pull it out on special occasions. It was so pure.

Grandpa holding me.

And that’s just how he was, really—pure. A very simple man who cared about the purest of things in life—family, respect, and laughter, above all. And speaking of laughter— gosh, he had the best sense of humor. There would be no speaking about Grandpa if we didn’t mention his sense of humor—it would be an injustice, a disservice, a misrepresentation. It’s only been a week and there have been so many things where my family and I are like, Gosh, Grandpa would have had such a kick out of that. His laugh was great too— he laughed in a New York accent - it was a warm, whispery, squinty-eyed laugh, one that sounded more like a heh-heh-heh than a ha-ha-ha.

Two days after my Grandpa died was my brother Giulio’s birthday. We did our best to pocket our grief for a couple of hours to have a cheerful birthday dinner for Giulio, though it was rough for all of us, especially for my mom. Giulio was so concentrated on making his birthday wish this year, his eyes were squeezed so extra tight, that his candle blew out just before he had a chance to blow it out himself, and when he finally opened his eyes to do it, his face melted into a shocked frown, followed by a rushed and failed attempt to catch the smoke trail it left behind, which was then followed by a frustrated grimace—all in a matter of approximately one millisecond. I got it all on video. (You had to be there.) Grandpa would have loved that. I could just hear him and see him at the end of the table, with his coffee cup and a little dixie plate full of coffee-cake crumbs in front of him, craning his neck and squinting his eyes at the phone, then pulling his head back, laughing heh heh heh.

---

I’ve been to wakes and I’ve been to funerals, but nothing prepares you for the wake and the funeral of someone whose expressions you know like a deck of cards, whose voice is an integral backing-track of your early childhood, whose DNA is so closely intertwined with your own, that you can see traces of that person in your parents, in your brothers, in yourself.

Grandpa looked like a stranger to me in his coffin. His hands were folded around a black-beaded rosary, dressed in a black suit and a white linen shirt. It almost looked as if someone had snuck into a crypt, stolen some Saint statue, and put some clothes on it. If someone had whispered in my ear that this was all some elaborate heist to spite the Catholic church, I might have willed myself to believe them… I would have, if I hadn’t been there in the hospital a few days earlier, watching Grandpa as he breathed his last breaths.

He looked like a creature undergoing a transition—from organic, to chrome. From flesh, to marble. His body was completely, chillingly still. Just beside him in the coffin was a picture that my six year old cousin drew of Grandpa and an angel standing underneath a rainbow, presumably depicting him arriving in Heaven, spelled in crooked crayon: “Hevin”.

There was no more warm raspy Grandpa-voice left inside of him. No more fresh heh heh heh’s or surprised & impressed looks being saved for the fun times of the future—all of them were expended, every last one. All of our tokens, swallowed by the vending machine. Banished now to live on only in our memories.

I kissed Grandpa on his head four times after he died. The first time, before my mom and I left the hospital after midnight, the day it happened. Then twice, the day of the wake. The last time was in the last hour of his open-casket, the morning of the funeral, before the funeral home-people hammered the last nail in the coffin and transported his body to the Church in a black limousine for the funeral mass. Every single time, his skin was ice cold. Jarringly cold. So cold, it scared me. I couldn’t get over it. It was like kissing the head of C3PO. I didn’t know that human flesh could feel like that.

As beloved old friends and distant relatives began to file in, pay their respects, and even mingle, I shuddered as I flickered my eyes over to his body in the corner, shut down, lifeless. What a bizarre, awful feeling, seeing family and strange people gathering in a space that the family rented just so that your lifeless grandpa could lie in an adorned box in the corner of the room while all these people swirled around with mouths downturned, eyes vacant, like guppies in a tank.

I remember in my early childhood, being at dozens of shopping-plaza birthday parties in the early 2000’s in suburbia, at the notorious Chuck. E. Cheese—a hellscape that I can’t believe was ever invented, and actually still exists. At these birthday parties, without fail, I used to sneak off to the back room before it was time—a theater, of sorts— to stare, entranced, at the lifeless animatronic characters in between sets - Chuck E. Cheese, the giant animatronic rat, and his weird friends who would break into song while you and your classmates ate greasy pizza and Costco cake. I couldn’t tell you wtf kind of animals the other ones were. All I know is that they were six-foot tall pieces of machinery covered in matted fur and store-merch, and that they were scary as hell when they weren’t moving. Was I weirdly masochistic? Or was I just so transfixed by the mystery of why anyone would ever think to invent such a thing, that I felt the need to isolate myself from the rest of the world for a little while, to stare into the hollow eyes of an animatronic rat?

The week after a death of a close relative feels a little bit like that. Like being a kid again at a Chuck E. Cheese— willing yourself to stare at a frozen-still, hollow-eyed machine dressed in clothing. Self-isolation. Going home and mulling it all over, asking questions, drowning in mysteries about human nature, your life, their life, everyone’s lives, the weirdness and utter chaos of the reality that you belong to.

Wait, Grandpa. Do you hear me? Can you hear my thoughts? I wasn’t done. I wasn’t done. I wasn’t done.

---

The first time Grandpa ever opened up to me about his time in the Marines was a few weeks ago in the hospital, during the California conversation. At some point, his curious eyes turned from the phone screen to me, and asked, “What part of California was this?”

“Carlsbad,” I answered.

“Carlsbad,” he repeated slowly, thinking. “I took a boat not too far from there, to Japan. When I was in the Marines.”

Marines lore? Grandpa never spoke about his time in the Marines. I was always too afraid it would be too triggering to bring up, so I never did. I was so excited that he was doing it now.

“You did? No way!”

“Yea.” He said. It looked like he was going to keep going. I wanted to keep him on this subject. “How long did it take to get from there to Japan?” I asked.

“17 days.” he answered. “I was stationed in Okinawa.”

“Okinawa,” I repeated.

“Yea.” He thought about it a moment. “Nice people, in Okinawa. Very nice people. Very respectful.” He nodded as he thought about it.

“It’s beautiful there. There was a tailor down the street who made me a custom suit for 30 dollars. Beautiful suit, good quality...”

It looked like he could have kept going, but just then a health aid trudged in to take his blood pressure. “Hello Vincent,” she drawled, getting right to business. I could just tell by her face that this woman was ready to go home. I shuffled around the bed and gave her my spot. She sighed as she changed some tubing, pulled the velcro strap off the thing on the wall, and guided his arm into position.

When (I thought) she was done, I scootched around the hospital bed and slid right back into the seat next to Grandpa, ready to hear more about Okinawa and Grandpa’s time in the Marines. I could see him willing himself to start up his engines again; could almost hear it, like the sputtering of an old car. I could see the determination in his body language willing all his energy to return, his lip quivering, preparing to speak, and eyes turning back towards me in slow motion.

But just then another person interrupted us, a nurse or a doctor, this time. The chair screeched against the tile as I stood up as soon as I had sat down and scooted around again, relocating myself to the other side of the bed.

When the new person in scrubs pulled back the bed sheet, a huge pool of blood was spilling out of grandpa’s arm, right where the blood pressure strap had been. It was shocking how suddenly it had appeared, as if a red lipstick had somehow exploded and melted all over the sheets in the short time that it had taken to take Grandpa’s blood pressure. My mother’s face snapped into a shocked frown.

“Oh my god, Da!”

My mom whisked out of the room and into the hallway to alert the medical staff behind the desk. More scrub-minions piled into the room.

“… has a skin-tear. You have to be careful, his skin is very thin from the chemo…”

“Ma’am, it was not a skin-tear…”

“…Registered Nurse…at this hospital… know what a skin tear looks like. That’s a skin tear.”

Versions of this went on for almost an hour. Grandpa said nothing. He just watched and complied as nurses and doctors poked and prodded, taking out all their instruments, tossing around medical jibberish, checking numbers and charts and asking crucial questions.

I stood back, watching the whole scene unfold, thinking about how Grandpa hadn’t even flinched as his blood pressure was being taken… I wondered if he had felt it when the skin had torn, but somehow hadn’t noticed he was bleeding?…Or if he had noticed, but didn’t have the energy to tell anyone? I couldn’t decide which was worse.

I was watching in real time as Grandpa’s world was getting smaller. His days now were now measured by versions of this— his kids coming and going, bringing him food he wasn’t eating, doctors swooping in and poking things in his arm, placing tablets on his tongue. These were the kinds of moments that would define the last days of his life. He was like a fish from the sea, now trapped in a bowl, staring at the kids behind glass, floating in circles.

I never did get to hear Grandpa speak more about his time in the Marines that day, and I never will.

My mom and I finally left the hospital about two hours later, after one complication, and then another. I would have stayed until the sun went down, but his head started drooping like a flower—the events of the day draining his energy, little by little. By four five-thirty pm, we could tell his eyes were only still open because we were still there. So we decided to go.

On the way out the door, I said,

“You look great grandpa. You’re going to get better.” It was a Hail Mary. We both knew it wasn’t true.

At least not in this lifetime… But maybe out there, in Heaven or the eleventh dimension or wherever, it is true.

Maybe Grandpa’s up there right now on Heaven’s porch, having coffee with Jesus and Great Grandma and Rocco, their old old sock-puppet-looking crusty-eyed Maltese who has been “at the groomer getting his haircut” since 2009.

That’s what I’d like to believe, because I don’t want to live in a world where that isn’t true.

---

When I think about my last day with Grandpa, I don’t think about the seven hour hospital visit two weeks later where my aunts and uncles and cousins and I sat with him as he gasped for air. I think about our last conversation, which ended too soon.

I guess that day, in-and-of-itself, is oddly representative of losing someone. You can know someone your whole life, but never discover the hidden rooms inside their mind.

And then in moments when you finally start to, things happen—some preventable nonsense takes place and puts everything on pause. Maybe it puts a wedge in between you both, lasting until the rest of your lives; a gap in communication, in conversation, in understanding…one that never really had to be there in the first place.

And at the end of their life, when you are staring at them in a coffin, you realize that this person didn’t die when they actually died. They died for you, then—in the moment that a problem was introduced, which was never resolved.

In many ways, I feel robbed of the time that I had with my Grandpa.

But robbed by who, Sofia? A person? God? Time? Cancer? Some dilemma? The health aid on her last shift who tore his skin that day by accident? The Moon? The Sun? The Stars?

Maybe no one. Maybe nothing.

And even if I was robbed, so what.

I don’t have the energy for vengeance, or anger, or resentment. The stars don’t deserve to hear me complain. I’m not that kind of person.

I have too much love to share with all the other people in my life to allow this mugging to put hate into my heart.

by the way like most animals in nature I believe that when I’m a mother someday this philosophy will be utterly tossed out the window. utterly mauled. burned at the stake. I’d kill for my kids. i am saving all of the violence in my heart body and soul for people who dare come for my children.

but, in every other circumstance… I’m simply not a vengeful person.

I think this is what real, true sadness feels like…it’s all blue, with no traces of other colors.

No traces of red (anger),

No traces of green (envy, vengeance),

No traces of yellow (joy, levity),

It’s just blue.

It’s the color that’s left after all the anger and resentment and disbelief disappears, and you realize you’re still really, really sad. It’s the sadness that’s left even after you’ve accepted things. I think part of accepting things like this is realizing that this pain will never actually go away. You can accept something, and still be god-awful sad.

And I guess that’s how I’m feeling in this moment, about the whole thing. Right now I’m in a shade of blue that’s deep and dark like the nighttime over the ocean. Punctured with white holes—questions, thoughts, memories. Sometimes there are storms that appear out of no where, thrashing the blue around a large, expansive stretch that looks like it will go on forever.

And maybe in a few months I’ll be in a shade of blue that’s light like the sky. Pale, but constant.

Whitish blue, like pearls.

The last day we spent together.