Your ashes sailed away from your children. Or maybe they sank into the depths of the Ganga River. Or perhaps, they were pecked upon by birds or eaten by fish. I don’t know. I should’ve been there with the rest of the family, but I wasn’t. Guilt has a way of lodging itself in our bodies and minds, finding itself a comfortable rent-free spot and staying there, poking at us with memories, could-haves and should-haves.
Thinking about it now—and over the past decade, since you passed away—I try to make sense of how things went from you wrapping your arms around my eight-year-old-self, as we both laughed out loud in the front yard of your home where I was visiting you on my annual summer vacation, to your body being cremated and your ashes lowered into the river.
All that passed between those two moments was such a heartbreaking, joyous, confusing, thrilling, fearful, banal, gratuitous experience, to put just a few labels to it. We call it life. And we try to come to terms with coming, being and going. But for some reason, when it comes to you, my beloved grandmother, I can’t bring myself to accept that you’re gone. I don’t want to.
I want to hang onto you
I wish I’d spent more time with you as you neared your end, but I was so caught up in the business of living that I didn’t realize the preciousness of our time on Earth, and how the shadows of regret can follow us for years, long after the sun of our actions has set.
There are lots of reasons why I miss you. I miss the sense of safety, support and love I felt when you held me in your arms as a baby. I long for the sight of that calming, loving smile that often adorned your face, despite whatever challenges you were facing. I reminisce about how, when I used to stop at your house on the way to my home from undergrad, you used to hug me tight, cook me my favourite meals and, when I was ready to leave, kiss my forehead and bless me with those words that I’ll never forget: “May you be happy, my love.”
I pine for your generous and caring nature, not just towards me, but towards all people you encountered, whether it was your children or a homeless person on the street.
And then there are times when I don’t want a logical, rational solution to some of life’s overwhelming problems. Sometimes, all I want is a person to lean on silently, someone whose hands I can hold and feel comfort and reassurance. That’s it: no words, no counselling, no advice, no practical solutions; just the simple act of holding hands and hugging. Your hands and your hugs.
In my wallet, I carry a photo of you hugging me in your front yard. Every time I look at that photo, something in my heart wants to replay the tape of time and have you next to me again. I want to hang onto you, stubbornly refusing to let go of your hands. Time pulled them away from me, but I live under the belief that I can override time’s actions and keep you snug and close to me.
I look for you in photos of my childhood, in conversations about you with my mother and uncles and aunts, in hazy memories of our times together. I often run my fingers over that photo of us, feeling your face, as if that might resuscitate the past. Your arms are wrapped around my head, in the photo. I place my arm where yours was, more than 35 years ago, and try to search for any leftovers of your presence. Our bodies store memories, and just perhaps, I think, I might find a few crumbs of your love if I search long enough.
It’s late February and the flowers are starting to shyly peek out of their holy nests, their buds. I’m on a walk in a park, and one part of the park is painted purple with crocuses sprouting up from the Earth and soaking in the coveted February sunshine. I have to stop. There’s something beautiful and mysterious about the whole thing.
This is a park I usually go for walks in, most Sundays. Over the course of the winter walks, I hadn’t realized that buried under the ground were seeds of crocuses. It looked barren, cold and damp, showing no signs of the wonder it was hiding and nourishing. It just took its own sweet time before it decided to let the flowers start to crawl up and bloom.
You had been manifesting in other forms
The ground was wet from last night’s rains, but a few more drops of water dribbled down onto the flowers. My tears. I found you, Grandma.
You had been manifesting in various forms all along; I was so stuck on trying to find you in your original physical human body that I hadn’t thought about how you might bloom in other myriad ways.
The more I paid attention, the more I saw and felt you: clouds rushing by on a sunny-rainy spring afternoon, the cool late-evening summer breeze blowing across my face as I hiked in the desert, a hummingbird hovering near a feeder, a housefly making crazy circles in the living room, a blueberry ripening to sweetness in late July, a cherry blossom finally greeting the world after huddling in its buds during the cold winter. The list could keep growing.
Finding you as a cherry blossom or a crocus or a squirrel didn’t yet resolve the grief and sadness I feel about your absence.
I don’t know which form you’re taking and when. I don’t have any way to prove it. Watching those crocuses blossom in a space that seemed—to me, at least—devoid of any visible life forms, triggered something in my instincts and opened my mind to the idea that perhaps I was looking for you in the wrong places.
I was reminded of a concept I had read about, a while ago, from Thich Nhat Hanh: Our existence on Earth is part of a continuum of various forms of manifestation, one of which is human. ‘We’ were something else earlier on. Then, grace and wonder married and brought us into a human body. We live, thanks again largely to grace and wonder. And when our time’s up, we move on and take another form, like a western meadowlark hopping from one bush to another.
I still miss you the same. Finding you as a cherry blossom or a crocus or a squirrel didn’t yet resolve the grief and sadness I feel about your absence. That might take time, and I’m OK with however long it takes. Because now, I can pick up that late-February cherry blossom, hold you—and grief and sadness—in my hands and imagine that I’m eight years old and we’re laughing in your front yard. You’re with me.
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image 1 debowscyfoto from Pixabay 2 image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay
