Have you ever tried to format your grief?Perhaps tried to classify it into five consecutive stages to follow like a guideline or a blueprint for mourning?Or arranged it into a neat circle of folding chairs where strangers sit and share mutual experiences?Or tried to organize it within the framework of poetic form, to restrict the emotional weight to the expectations of rhyme and meter and keep it within the constraints of dictated structure? Thinking there is comfort in the formula and familiarity, that the unexpected won’t creep in?Tried to find comfort despite knowing a line must break itself to find relief, despite knowing that poetry is a series of fractures that offer no reprieve?Sonnets, sestinas, ballads, and elegies, all a distraction from the progress of grief.
It was expected. It was relieving to know his suffering had ended. But grief and relief don’t like to sit together in the pit of one’s stomach.It’s July 2019.I step off the plane into a familiar home with a foreign air. A home where his absence is made more obvious by the remnants of his presence.We drive. We count cows and traffic lights. We pick pictures and read cards and watch a person get packed into boxes. I find a stray golf ball under our swing in the yard.The transitionary period between presence and acceptance of absence is a curious time that sometimes lingers unresolved.
Half the room sits in rental folding chairs that clash with the wood-paneled walls and yellowed linoleum flooring. The other half stand elbow to elbow around a collection of casseroles and comfort foods in mismatched Pyrex.No one sits in his recliner.Time is marked by intervals of sitting and standing and eating in a crowded room full of people somehow related to me retelling rehearsed stories of my grandfather. Stories I can tell have been told a hundred times before and will be told a hundred times more.I collect fragments of my grandfather and try to tuck them in my pockets.
Instead. these fragments dissolve into indiscernibility. All these gathered people have their own memories and their own stories and their own versions of my grandfather.But I can’t piece together their memories into him.Because those aren’t my memories. My memories of my Pa are sacred. My Pa was made up of gumballs and golf balls. Of favorites and darlin’s and walks to my great aunt’s. Of wood swings and old chains and conversations between the creaks.And, most especially, of Truckstop pancakes.
And I begin to wonder what would the memory of Pa look like to someone with no immediate recollection of him. If I were to have a child one day, what stories and pictures would they latch onto? What details would they get wrong?
I didn’t cry until the funeral.He had still been there up until that point. Everything we had done that week had been so saturated with Pa that I forgot to miss him.And for as much as he’d surrounded that week, haunting every conversation, preserved in every picture frame hung in my grandmother’s house, and smiling from every program handed out at the front of the church, I still couldn’t look at him.Nor could I look at my father as he gave the eulogy, too afraid I’d count the deepening lines on his face and discover he had too few left to grow into.
Later, I’ll drive by the old truck stop.It’s nothing much now. Just a vacant building of abandoned used-to-be’s. It’s parking lot emptied.And I’m too full of memories.
