My uncle died last week.
I was in my living room, settling back in just before my final semester of college, watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy that I had already seen, drinking a beer and contemplating ordering a pizza. All signs pointed to the most regular sort of night one can have. Maybe we’d play some card games, just do something quiet.
My mom called out of nowhere. That doesn’t really happen a lot. It started with the normal stuff: hey, how are you, I’m fine, what are you doing?
It turned into “Kate, I have some news. Uncle Larry had a heart attack today, and he passed away.”
I think I laughed into the phone, the ugly kind that has nothing to do with humor and everything to do with feeling like someone has strangled the breath from your insides and you’re starting to cry for help. I stood on my balcony for a bit. The air felt wonderful on my skin. My mom told me the little details that she knew, that she was on her way home and they were headed down to see my aunt and cousin in the morning, that if I needed anything I could call, that she called her family and I should probably expect a call from the rest of them at some point.
I looked back in the window and realized that I missed the ending of that Grey’s episode. It’s Arizona’s birthday, and after her botched surprise party, she tells Callie she loves her for the first time. It’s sweet, and it’s the kind of thing that makes an impression on you.
I went back inside, and I told my friends that my uncle had died. I sat down, finished my beer, and told everyone that we needed to carry on with our night because if I sit and wallow in my stupid sadness then I would never be able to get it out of my system.
I spent the whole week that way. I swallowed everything down where I could, and I kept a straight face when I wasn’t alone. Even in the moments where I could find respite and be alone, I tried not to let myself cry. I did whatever it took to keep my shit together because the last thing I want in a time of grief is eyes on me. Truly, do not look at me if I even seem the slightest bit upset. I need to keep a cold and calm exterior, and with a significant amount of attention, I will cry at any moment.
There’s a sort of chill I feel the need to adopt in a moment like this. When I was a kid, I cried a lot. It was a running joke about me that I’ve never been able to shake, even as I got older and wasn’t crying whenever I had to leave a party or the moment someone hurt my feelings or whatever. I spent a lot of my time and energy choosing to be unemotional to the point where, when it came time to actually have feelings, it felt like I didn’t know how to anymore. I got the help I needed to figure that all out, so it shouldn’t feel like this anymore. Reverting into that, though? It feels like slipping into your rattiest old sweatshirt. It’s almost a comfort, even when it feels so shitty in the end.
My uncle was really sick about 9 years ago. Nobody explained it to me until recently, but he had stage 4 cancer in his spine that spread to his liver and brain. It was the kind of sick that would have taken pretty much anyone else. My uncle never really felt like just anybody. He was brash and loud, and he was always determined to be the very best at everything he did. He would go out of his way to help anyone who needed it. When a huge snowstorm hit his area, he and my aunt went around their whole neighborhood to help everyone clear their driveways and sidewalks. This guy was so much larger than life. I tend to hate that phrase, but this is the one person about whom it ever really felt real. He got better, and it felt like we all got better. It was almost like something out there knew that the whole world would really miss him if he was gone, and he got to stick around for another nine years.
Whatever grace period he was granted by developments in medicine and the power of the human condition ended last weekend, and it took this warm anchoring presence out of all of our lives. The outpouring of love from his community made something inside me stir. I didn’t know how to just be upset and to grieve, and here were all of these people I had never met telling stories about him in obituaries and Facebook comments.
We were sitting in the church on the morning of his funeral just the other morning, and I was freezing. We kept waiting for it to snow because the forecast said it was supposed to be an ugly day, even on top of the cold. It never did. In all of my shivering, I finally broke.
All of these people kept showing up at my side, wanting to hug me and tell me that they were sorry for my loss, that my uncle was a great man and that everyone would miss him. It was hours of the same things I had heard, things I already knew. Then, I sat there, thinking about how cold I was and receiving all of these condolences from people I barely knew, and something just cracked.
You don’t have to be cold when the person you are grieving was so warm. You’re not a brick wall. I am not a brick wall. I know how goofy that sounds. I’m not sitting here writing an “it’s okay to cry !! :)” piece for all of you, because you are adults who surely already know that. Cry whenever you want. Don’t cry if that’s how you feel. Don’t feel like you have to cry all the time.
Learning how to grieve is never something that’s come easy to me. I often describe my high school ceramics class in the same way–and I hate anything that does not come naturally to me in some way. Death and the dealings that come with being the person left behind have never been easy for me. I am not a person who copes. I hate coping. It’s just too hard.
To grieve, in its most annoying and simple terms, is to suffer grief. Grief is a response to a loss, one that often comes with death. What is it if not the feeling of being left behind? It might not be abandonment, the way that our other feelings of left behindness might be, or maybe it is. It’s learning how to live your life again without someone who has meant something to your existence. There was a person who made an impression on you, and suddenly, now there isn’t. The emptiness sucks away at everything, whether for a brief moment of steeling sadness or a much longer one. You have to just grieve the way that you grieve. I still, even having experienced so many losses by now, don’t really know how to do it, but I’m trying to be better. I’m trying to learn how to just remember and keep going.
Grief, though, is this thing that can eat you alive in a way that no other feeling can. When something feels unresolved, when something or someone is just taken away from you and gone and something that felt like a solid institution in your existence is just no longer there, what the hell are you supposed to say? What are you supposed to do? The thing that has always worked for me is the same stupid shit you hear at all these funeral things.
Remembering that a person lived and was loved, not just by you but by so many other people, and loved the life that they lived sometimes just has to be enough. It’s all that’s left. It won’t always feel like enough, and I know it doesn’t today. I’m warming up to the idea that it might be, eventually.
