Grief is Love
This morning the goats are bleating in the field, running to the fence for their morning treats. I am thinking of the lamb she had when she was little, who would wait for her to return from school at the gate in the garden. I never told her the stories of our borego matanzas because I knew the story of the lamb. How one day it wasn’t at the gate, and when she had cleared her plate and put it in the sink she discovered she had eaten it for dinner. She never ate lamb again. I think of this story every time we harvest a sheep. I thought about it while I spent three days tanning a sheep skin hide into the most luxurious textile I’ve ever owned. I think about it every time I meet the goats at the fence.
She said to keep it fresh, and I promised to keep writing.
In January my Grandmother died. We didn’t call her Grandma, or Gran, or Grammy even though towards the end she asked me to call her Gram. We called her Inook, a culturally appropriated and appreciated term she learned on an Arctic cruise. She insisted she was, “Too young to be a grandma.” So we called her our Inook (proper spelling Inuk). She told me it meant “elder”, and I later learned it is the singular form of Inuit which means “the people”. We should have had more reverence for the word and it’s use, our ignorance as children might excuse our past little selves and now it’s too late to rename her in my heart, or the stories I want to tell about her.
The word “Grandma” just never fits in my mouth when I think of her.
There are too many things to say, they press up against my throat and become a jumbled lump of syllables that spill out in wordless tears. But she told me to keep it fresh, and I promised to keep writing.
There is a place where I am her reflection, and she is mine. Where I see my hand in her hand, not just my child hand being held by hers but my hands aging into her hands. I hear her voice saying something stark and dark, but comforting and true, “Life is cruel”, “Beauty is pain”, “Suck it up buttercup” “Remember to edit” and “Life is strange when you’re a stranger”. There is a place where I find her and every tension that ever arose between us has dissolved in my tears and there is just the moment when we realized we were both wearing leopard print and she tossed her head back and smiled, and said “I love you” as she lay dying in her bed.
