I know it may sound naive, but I just didn’t know grief would feel like this.
My grandfather passed away on Wednesday, January 15, 2025, just before one o’clock in the afternoon. This was the first time in my life I’d felt truly stricken by grief, when everything I’d ever heard or read about grief began to make sense, the way love songs do when you fall head over heels for the very first time.
I had experienced the loss of family members and pets before, but this was the first time a person I was close to died. This was the first time someone died and it physically hurt me to exist in the aftermath of their passing. I just didn’t know it was going to be like this. I didn’t know how hard it would be to complete simple tasks when grief hovered over you like a constant shower you couldn’t turn off.
I spent countless weekends with my grandparents as a child. On Friday nights my mom would drop my sister and me off at their house in Middletown and we’d spend the weekend playing, watching movies, dressing up our American Girl dolls, shopping, all sorts of things. They took us on summer vacations and adventures to Colonial Williamsburg, Hershey Park, the Washington D.C. Zoo, New York City, and loads of other things that were thrilling because Mom Mom and Pop Pop were with us.
As we got older our time together grew thinner, what with the demands of high school and extracurricular activities, moving away to college, starting graduate school, and getting caught up in being a twenty-something. That is what it means to be a young adult, isn’t it? Simply being caught up in your own goals, your own schedule, your own business. Spending time with family members wasn’t a priority for me when I was scrambling up whatever career ladder I thought I wanted. But my grandparents were a constant. Every holiday, graduation, dance recital, or important event, they were there to celebrate with me. They were an immovable force, still living in the same house they bought in 1998, still wearing khaki pants and Ralph Lauren shirts. Still putting baby powder in their shoes before they left the house.
Mercifully, my grandfather was on hospice at his home. As he lay unconscious in a hospital bed parked at one end of their impeccably decorated living room—think Ethan Allen meets antique family heirlooms—I would stand beside him, talking, thinking, recounting as many childhood memories as I could. My whole childhood flashed before my eyes as I watched him die. And after two and a half days of this, when he made the final transition, I felt like my childhood was truly over.
Sure, I’ve been a legal adult for over 14 years. But being in a house with someone as they take their final breaths, being so intimately involved with the end of their life aged me. It didn’t age me in an, “I’m so exhausted I feel so old,” sort of way. It matured me, like an aged wine or cheese. The essence of my being was still the same, but I tasted different. I felt different. I was different. The naivety that all the people I deeply loved would live forever was gone. Vanished. Evaporated. And even though I’m 32 and I knew people died, I didn’t know it like I know it now. I finally understand how truly awful this is. How, when someone dies, they aren’t here anymore. You can’t see them. You can’t visit, or ask a question, or send a birthday card. They’re gone.
Even in the foggy days immediately following his death, I kept having small moments of panic that he wasn’t actually dead. That he’d wake up in the funeral home and shout, “Hey wait! I’m still alive!” And we’d have to go and pick him up. I would feel terrible that he spent the night at a funeral home, but then we’d have a great laugh about it and go out to breakfast. I knew this was irrational. But a small part of me still thought it could be true.
I didn’t know how it would feel to have a hole in your heart, accompanied by an ache that stretched through every fiber of your being. Not fatigue, not exhaustion, but the ache of grief. It ran through my veins and nailed me to the ground, causing every movement to occur in slow motion, as if I had become part sloth overnight. I wasn’t prepared for the endless stream of tears that could be triggered by the smallest of things, like seeing a picture of him. Or thinking of how he laughed. Or remembering how truly awesome he was.
The day after he died, my mom (his daughter) and I went to the grocery store. Standing fifteen feet apart in the bakery section in our individual hazes of grief, we both happened to stop and stare at his favorite food: a chocolate-topped donut. I hung onto the cart as my gaze traveled through the glass display case and into the past, and mom stood at a table of pre-packaged donuts, both of us frozen in time. We didn’t realize we had each honed in on the one food that could make us both cry just by looking at it, until at the very same moment we turned toward one another and my mom said, “These were his favorite.”
The day after that, I tried to make a smoothie for breakfast and put the oat milk carton away in a cabinet instead of the refrigerator. I had no ability to cook hot meals, barely enough wherewithal to wash my hair, and I can’t remember doing a single helpful thing around the house. In fact, I firmly believe that I was the opposite of helpful that first week of grief. It took all the energy I had to teach my scheduled yoga classes and transport myself to and from.
We held a celebration of life at my mom’s house just three days after he died so that my uncle could be part of the gathering before he traveled back to Georgia, where he lives. That day, I couldn’t look at a picture of my grandfather without bursting into tears. I didn’t know how sad it was when someone you loved died. I didn’t understand that you’d miss them fiercely, and that all you’d want was a bit longer with them, even though “a bit longer” would never be enough.
Because he had dementia for the last six or seven years, I hadn’t realized how much the disease had taken from our time together until I looked back at the pictures from my childhood. I suddenly remembered that he hadn’t always been old and sick. At one time he was young and vibrant, chasing my sister and me around the yard and teaching me how to fish. Before that, he and my mom took a scuba certification course and went diving together for years. Before that, he was in the Army, a newlywed serving during the Cuban Missle Crisis, starting a life with the woman he’d spend the next 62 years with. He was a genuinely kind, fun, and loving person. He was ornery, loved to laugh, and loved to be on the water. He was so much more than what we could ever fit into an obituary, or what we could reminisce about during his Celebration of Life. He was a whole person who lived a whole, full life. He was deeply loved, and loved all of us. You can see it in the pictures that we have. You can see it on everyone’s faces, how awesome he truly was.
When a person you love and trust disappears, your world changes. There’s one less person loving you, and you can feel their absence, the absence of someone who’d wonder what you’d be up to on a Saturday afternoon. Who’d pretend to care about whatever knitting project you had brought to the hospital. Who’d have the same memories as you from the same vacations, but from a perspective you could never know.
Even though he had been declining for years, even though the last month was awful (a broken hip, surgery, weeks in the hospital, and the dementia ward in a rehab facility), even though we all knew this was coming, it was still both unbelievable and unbelievably painful. He had kept on being alive for so long that I was in shock he was actually gone.
Though we did not have a formal funeral service, my grandmother got prayer cards printed with his picture and a brief obituary. Mine serves as a bookmark. Each night, when I climb into bed and prepare to read for a bit, I open my book and see my grandfather, holding the last page I read. Some nights this brings me to tears, and other nights, it brings me great comfort. After all, I’m so lucky that he never loses my place.
There are all sorts of reminders of him through my apartment—wire hangers he covered with yarn, baskets he wove, pictures of us from years ago. He loved being a grandfather, and I think that’s why it hurts so much. It’s because we all loved him, and we knew he loved us. And now, as they say, that love has nowhere to go, no one to receive it. So it boomerangs back to me in the form of grief, which is painful and heavy and confusing. It doesn’t feel like love. But how was I to know that? We don’t know how anything feels until it’s happening, no matter how much we try to prepare.
I could say a million other things about him, grief, caring for my grandmother, and how I’m just starting to feel “normal” again. I could say more about how I hadn’t planned on 2025 beginning with COVID and the death of a loved one, and how I feel like February 1 is really my January 1, since this past month was lost to sickness and grief. But this is all still new for me—it’s been just over two weeks since he passed. This is the first I’ve been able to write about this experience at all, even my private journals have no entries.
I can’t emphasize how shocking it has been to experience grief, even though I knew it was coming. And while other people in my life will die in the future, I won’t ever have this “first time” feeling again. I won’t ever be able to return to this moment and know what it feels like to be in my body, my mind. I won’t be able to return to the moment when I wrote the first sentence of this post and invited my sadness onto the page. Even remembering how sad I truly was a week ago seems difficult. This is why we write things down, so we don’t forget.
People have told me it’s never easy, and I think I believe them. I just didn’t know it would feel like this.