Duérmete pedazo de mi corazón

CW: grandparent loss

+++++

My grandmother died.

I’m not ready to write about it yet, but if you’re wondering when it happened, you could say it was last month.

It was last month in the sense that is when an ICU doctor looked at her brain activity and declared time of death. It was last year in the sense that is when a surgeon performing a cancer resection ligated an artery that would eventually lead to a fatal bowel ischemia. It was February in the sense that is when she gave up and the vital, effervescent, opinionated woman I had known all my life faded away like the sun dips behind the horizon—slowly, slowly, slowly, in a searing scorch that demands your breathless, squinting attention. And then, instantly, all at once.

Only this light in my life won’t ever rise again.

We had a celebration to remember her five days after the doctor pronounced her dead and what felt like months too late. Ever since, I’ve been going through her belongings, in fits and starts, whenever I can work up the emotional energy to open another bin and release the air from her apartment. Air that smells like my very first home and cookery and her ubiquitous perfume. Air so precious I wish I could open each bin in a hermetically sealed room to capture the essence through fractional distillation to bottle up, then guard as zealously as a dragon guarding a horde. Air so goddamned ephemeral I want to scream every time it escapes.

Fits and starts. It’s the same way I’d been going through life for what felt like forever, but was really just five years ago, when I contracted the infection that changed my life, until two years ago when I started a medication that offered marginal recovery. This past month, though—this past month, I’ve felt that existential nothingness I’d hoped to never feel again. The familiar and dreaded sensation that a piece of my brain is missing.

Strange how it’s the brain that feels excavated when it’s the heart that has been ablated.

I suspect that someday science will confirm what many of us already know—that like Covid and the flu and so many other “acute” illnesses, grief, loss, and trauma cause a sort of brain damage. Whether its inflammation or circulation or neurochemical imbalances, we’re in heterostasis if—or more hopefully—until we can find a new equilibrium.

And that’s all I’ll say about that for now.