By Emma Do
I am made of grief, the first funeral I attended, and the resemblance of the people I love.
I am far from being someone who can recall everything that happened when they were nine. I barely remembered what I had for breakfast, that is if I ate anything at all. Memories are complicated. They are stories, birthday cards, the face of someone I could not make out of a blurry silhouette, and the taste of childhood snacks that somehow became just too sweet for my nineteen-year-old taste buds. I am nothing more but a dainty labyrinth of other people’s laughs, of my friends’ favourite dining spot, of my mama’s habit of pushing the lift buttons delicately with her index knuckle, or of my aunt’s delightful meals she cooks every time I return home for the break. People walked into my open, blank chapters and filled the empty pages with pieces of their hearts. Some came late, so they added their little notes or a few annotations here and there instead. When people left me, they were never actually gone. The remnants of us are forever ingrained in those lines, the versions we created together exist within these stories, plot twists, and cliffhangers. Everyone carried a part of me with them and left theirs at my place. Suddenly, we are everywhere, but simultaneously, void, in our own consciousness.
Whenever I share the bed with my mama every once in a while we talk. There was something about the stillness of the empty streets outside or the faint moonlight seen through the thin sheer curtains that might bring my mama to tell me the stories she had kept carefully for herself and me. I have heard decades of her life packed in fragmented memories, they are like puzzles sprawled out on the blank ceiling in front of my eyes, fitted perfectly together as if everything she told me was intentional. Then, she talked about my grandma, she always did. My mama’s stories were simply a recollection of what she had learned from my grandma, the build-up of morality, some old-school naggings, how to treat the people around you with an extra ounce of kindness. My mama’s obsidian eyes reflect my grandma’s tenacious, loving soul, and kindness, and the older she gets, the more her grin resembles my grandma’s.
Someone once told me that life is nothing but a Tetris game. You are repeatedly pushed into people or situations that would never have piqued your attention otherwise, and you are expected to conquer them. I remember one day, I was coming home to my grandma’s newly baked bread sticks coated in condensed milk, and the next thing I knew, the yeasty aroma of flour and milk became cheap takeaways after a football pub night in London. Life twists and turns around the things you love, unfolds in the mundane of your daily routines, yet strongly reminds you of its presence in the simple breaths you take. Life teaches you that moments do not stay forever.
My grandpa died when I was in fourth grade, and even the days leading up to his death are a fog in my mind until now. It was the first funeral I ever attended. It would be an exaggeration to say it broke the nine-year-old me, but telling the small girl that day when she was cautiously dragged out of her art class early to see her grandpa draped in medical wires and asked to say her farewell words to him would be perplexing. I didn’t shed a tear during my grandpa’s funeral, nor the other two that came around not long after. I hold my memories delicately like the way I might pour through the old, dusty photo albums whenever we deep clean the storage cupboards. I trace my finger on the wrinkles of my grandparents in those images and saw our wide smiles when we were together.
Grief is strange. The pain doesn’t get better as I grow up, it gets deeper. The memories of my lost loved ones don’t fade, they resurface on the nights I lay awake by the windowsill, silently crying as the last autumn breeze finds its way into the room. Sometimes, when the ache gets too much, I can feel it in my beating heart, between my veins, slithering through my ribcage, and choking my lungs. I’d recall how my grandma was the maker of hearty dinners, the giver of folk medicine when I fell sick, and the one who would always have my preferred juice boxes stocked in the fridge during the summer. I was divided between these unfamiliar discomforts when my mama asked me to compose a letter for my grandmother’s burial. Even something as effortless as writing out my thoughts became strenuous, and I could not recall how long it took me to type in the first letter on that white computer screen. I was bleeding out on a blank canvas. My words were sharp like a thousand needles were piercing through the ebbs and flows of my memory stream. And as I kept repeating the lines I wrote like a sincere prayer, I have never learned to let the grief go. Walking past the neighbourhoods where I used to live with my grandparents made me realise that grief is not purely a stage. It’s a constant ringing in my head that the stories I shared with them are real, as real as my tender skin, the wounds in my core and the light that touches where my heart was cracked open by its vulnerability.
The special thing about grief is that it defines my past, tangles part of my personality, and fabricates the trauma that writes who I am; it also turns into a justification for me to become better. I carry the yesterdays on my back, sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad; a gift or a burning burden. In all shapes and forms, however, they are ultimately reminders of love and comfort. I don’t think I’ll ever be truly healed, but there’s always beauty in being flawed because the emotions are unfeigned. And raw.
Illustration by Paavas Bansal
