*Beep*
"The person you're calling is..."
*click*
"Dead. The person I'm calling is dead."
I'm wearing grief like a shawl, pulling it tighter around myself to keep out the draft of normality. Who wants to go back to real life? Not I, I have busy things to do, I need to stare into space, wander aimlessly, shuffle around the house with a hot water bottle.
I have played at normality a little, the laugher of children lifting my soul, but that's not the real world, not now, the real world is in that house, stagnant, with grief congealing on every surface, powdered with it like a layer of dust. Grief is in the very air we breath and I swallow down lungfuls of it as if they will be my last.
I sleep fitfully, my dreams give me no comfort as I am paraded from one image to the next. I wake and find myself sleepwalking through the day. I read and each page blurs into the next and I wonder if I'm just reading the same sentence over and over like a broken record. I eat and it's ashes in my mouth, I watch films that would once have been a secret escape, now it is like being locked in an empty room. The mornings race away from me and the evenings crawl by, the minutes tormenting me, I long to sleep, perchance to scream.
"When you have a moment of happiness, does it make you feel guilty?"
"No"
Why? Should it? Was I such a bad granddaughter that I she would have wished me to stay in this deep pit of empty despair? I ponder this, I ponder everything. I know the answer but what more is there to do than ponder it all away?
I feel guilty telling people, I hate to hear them apologise, the sincerity, they have lost people, they can relate, but it is too small a gesture, I have to say it's fine, I have to placate them and my guilt at having brought it up is a small and awkward little feeling. How can I tell them how utterly tragic the truth is that the world has lost you, that a little piece of my perfect world has ceased to exist and a little part of me will have died with you?
How can I tell them that it is not sad at all, that you haven't really gone anywhere, you are in everything I see and do, you are in me and I rejoice that you ever were at all?
How can I tell them that it doesn't matter that you're gone because my whole being has gone numb and I can't really remember who you are or what you meant or who I am or what I am meant to be doing?
So it's fine, I say and keep my desperate swell of emotions to myself with a tight little smile, I wish you wouldn't apologise, but thank you anyway.
The children are great, they are heartfelt and when they go back to smiling and laughing I do not feel bitter that they can sweep you from their minds so easily, but a bitter little part of me feels that adults should know better, that your passing should rock the lives of every adult who hears, they should be falling apart at the news, the whole nation brought to it's knees in mourning.
These words have become commonplace, mourning, grief, passing, bereavement. They are the new glossary that accompanies our everyday lives. Not an hour goes by that I do not speak them. What happened to words I used to use to define my life and my time? What was I before I was bereaved? How did I define myself if not as someone nanless?
Am I nanless? Has your death changed who I am? There must have been a side of me only you knew, I was someone's granddaughter, now I am not, that died with you. I keep a piece of you with me, but you took a part of me with you and the world has changed as there is one less person who understands me, one less person who even wants to try.
I am all analogies and metaphors, smilies and cliches. My grief is a shawl and my memories are a quilt and wonder when I will be ready to exchange one for the other.
