No why. Just Here

Eric

 

My grandmother collapsed on our staircase. Her body rousing with grief. Hopeless, endless grief. Tears that she couldn’t breathe through. Crying, that rattled the bones of our house. Humming that I still hear. In her pink dressing gown, pilled by the years, she looked smaller than she’d ever seemed. She looked like a child. 

 

That night, death swarmed around us. 

 

We lost my Grandfather, and for every day that would follow, we missed him. 

 

It haunts me still, that as he lay dying, we were only sleeping.

 

My mum says she sees him in her dreams where he walks toward her, spritely and unaided. Always smiling. I’ve never been that lucky.

 

For some of us, death brings thoughts of human mortality closer. We dwell in the fragility of life. That we may love somebody, with everything we have, so completely, knowing all the while, that they could so easily be taken from us.

 

Perhaps though, we should consider that people we love come and go, exactly when they need to. 

 

My Grandfather made us laugh, taught us how to make miraculous things out of wood and nails, planted the seed for our eternal love of Moon River, farted with great pride, and raised my Mother to be the closest anyone could ever come to perfection. 

 

He watched us grow up, and we watched him grow old. We noticed as my Grandmother became his carer, as it wore away at her. The way she had been shuttled too quickly through old age. 

 

When he left us, he left little gaps. An empty chair at the kitchen table, an empty moment of silence. Half of a bed, a couch, a life, an early memory best told by two.

 

These days though, we laugh. We laugh at the politically incorrect things he said, his love of toilet humour, and the way the morphine had convinced him that people were parachuting out of his hospital window. 

 

I always remember sitting on his lap when I was little, listening to a story I had heard hundreds of times before. Listening with the same zeal as when I had heard it for the first time. He loved that.

 

And I would be there, perched on his lap knowing well, that when I looked away, he would surprise me by squeezing the muscle above my knee. It made me squeal and laugh uncontrollably.  

 

It’s an exquisite sensation; almost addictive, that I couldn’t help but want to experience time and time again. It’s at a place that’s impossible to pinpoint on your own, and a feeling that I’ve always struggled to explain.

 

The closest I’ve come to it, is when I picture him.

There’ll be a trigger, and the thought of my Grandpa will surface. Brief, divine, and painful all at once. And then it’s gone again.  

  1. no-why-just-here posted this