Grief.

What a wild roller coaster of emotions to experience.

One moment, you’re devastated that someone you love is gone. The next, you’re grateful they’re no longer in pain. Then comes the guilt for feeling even the smallest amount of relief. And somewhere in between all of that, you’re trying to remind yourself of the beauty in the way they left.

My grandma passed away on what would have been her and my grandpa’s 73rd anniversary.

She had been living without him for 16 years.

Sixteen.

Sixteen years that I can only imagine were long, painful, and lonely at times. Sixteen birthdays, Christmases, anniversaries, family gatherings, and ordinary Tuesday afternoons without the person she had built her life with.

So when she passed away, there was actually a part of me that was happy.

That feels like such a strange thing to say about someone’s death, but I was happy because she could finally be with Grandpa again.

After 16 years apart, they were together.

There was something incredibly beautiful about that.

And for a little while, I think that beauty made the grief easier to hold.

Then came the viewing.

Toward the end of the night, I finally started working up the courage to walk toward my grandma’s casket and say goodbye. But as I got closer, something happened that I wasn’t expecting.

I wasn’t just grieving my grandma anymore.

Suddenly, I was 10 years old again.

All of the loss, pain, anger, confusion, and guilt surrounding my grandpa’s death came rushing back with it.

And I realized that maybe I hadn’t dealt with his death nearly as much as I thought I had.

Growing Up Next Door

I grew up right next to my grandparents.

I would walk down to their house probably every day, raid their snack pantry, climb their giant willow tree, and read their collection of Winnie the Pooh books over and over again.

My grandma and grandpa were two of the kindest people I have ever known.

There wasn’t a mean bone in either of their bodies.

If someone needed to be fed, my grandma would give them a warm meal. My grandpa was always out in his shop working on some sort of project, and if someone needed help, he was there. That’s something I see in my dad now, too.

They had ten children together and somehow raised all of them with this deep understanding that family matters, that you take care of each other, and that seeing the world is one of life’s greatest privileges.

Those are things my parents passed down to my siblings and me, too.

Sometimes I think about how strange and beautiful it is that pieces of people continue traveling through generations.

My grandparents taught something to their children. Their children taught it to us. And now, whether we realize it or not, we’re teaching pieces of them to our own children.

Maybe that’s one of the ways people stay.

The Memories I Can’t Quite Reach

My grandpa died when I was 10 years old.

It was a Sunday.

For years, whenever I’ve talked about the day he died, I’ve said that I remember it vividly.

But recently I’ve realized that’s not entirely true.

I remember waking up and realizing my parents weren’t home. I asked my brother where they were, and he told me they were at Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

So I walked over.

And then everything becomes patchy.

There are a few moments that are crystal clear.

I remember holding Grandpa’s hand and saying goodbye.

I remember someone, either my mom or my sister, holding me when he passed.

I know we were there for a long time.

But I can’t tell you what happened during most of those hours.

It’s strange because I have plenty of memories from my childhood. I remember school. I remember friends. I remember things that happened before and after Grandpa died.

But when I reach for memories of that day, or even many memories of Grandpa himself, sometimes it feels like reaching through fog.

I know something is there.

I just can’t quite grab it.

For a long time, I told myself that I simply didn’t want to remember.

Maybe there’s some truth to that. But I’ve also learned that memory during overwhelming experiences isn’t always straightforward.

When something is frightening, traumatic, or simply too emotionally enormous for us to understand, our brains don’t necessarily record it like a movie. Stress can affect our attention and the way memories are encoded. Sometimes we’re left with intensely vivid fragments surrounded by stretches that are blurry or inaccessible.

There’s also something called dissociation, which can happen when an experience becomes psychologically overwhelming. In some cases, people can experience dissociative amnesia, where important autobiographical memories connected to trauma or extreme stress become difficult or impossible to recall.

I don’t know whether that’s what happened to me, and I’m not trying to diagnose my 10-year-old self.

Maybe some of those memories simply faded over 16 years.

Maybe I was in shock.

Maybe my brain didn’t fully encode everything happening around me.

Or maybe some combination of grief, stress, and being a little girl watching someone she adored die made those hours too much for my brain to organize into a neat little story.

I may never know.

What I do know is that my memories of Grandpa became tangled up with losing him.

When Home Doesn’t Feel the Same

Grandma and Grandpa were my best friends.

After Grandpa died, going to Grandma’s house hurt.

It wasn’t because I loved Grandma any less. I loved her tremendously.

But everything reminded me that he wasn’t there.

His picture was on the wall.

Someone else would sit in his recliner.

His things were still there, but he wasn’t.

So I stopped going over as much.

Looking back as an adult, I think that was probably my 10-year-old version of avoidance. When something hurts, sometimes our instinct is simply to stay away from the things that make it hurt more.

A 10-year-old doesn’t necessarily have the words to say, “Being in this house reminds me that someone I love is dead, and I don’t know how to handle that.”

Sometimes a 10-year-old just stops walking next door.

But avoiding something doesn’t necessarily make the grief disappear.

Sometimes it just gets quieter.

Grief Has a Long Memory

Grief has a funny way of sneaking up on you.

Even when I wasn’t actively thinking about Grandpa, my love for him was still there.

A song would come on Spotify and suddenly I’d be sobbing.

I’d picture him in his handsome driver’s caps, or at least I think that’s what they’re called, sipping a Diet Coke with his EIRMC water jug nearby.

Little pieces.

Tiny snapshots.

Enough to remind me how much I missed him.

Eventually, going to Grandma’s house became easier.

Life continued, as life inconveniently tends to do.

Then Grandma’s neurological health began declining.

Her dementia eventually made her short-term memory practically nonexistent. Sometimes there was something sweet about being able to tell her the same story several times and watch her face light up every single time as though she’d never heard it before.

But it was heartbreaking, too.

The older she became, the more fragile she became. She broke multiple bones over the years and eventually needed help with most of her daily activities.

But if there was one thing about my grandma, it was that you almost never heard her complain.

No matter how difficult things became, she would tell you:

“I’m doing great.”

And somehow, she meant it.

Losing Her Brought Him Back

At Grandma’s viewing, I broke.

I started walking toward her casket to say goodbye and suddenly couldn’t do it.

I started having a panic attack and had to sit in the corner and calm myself down. Eventually my mom came over, comforted me, and walked back to the casket with me.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to adequately explain what that moment felt like.

There was the excruciating sadness of losing Grandma.

There was relief that she wasn’t suffering anymore.

There was happiness at the thought of her being reunited with Grandpa.

And somehow, mixed into all of it, there was the grief of the 10-year-old girl who lost her grandpa 16 years earlier.

Psychologists sometimes describe grief as something that can be reactivated. A new loss can bring an earlier loss back to the surface, particularly when the people or circumstances are connected.

I think that’s what happened to me.

I went to Grandma’s viewing expecting to grieve Grandma.

I didn’t expect to grieve Grandpa again, too.

But maybe grief doesn’t care much about calendars.

Sixteen years didn’t matter in that moment.

I missed my grandpa.

I missed my grandma.

And suddenly I was grieving them both.

Saturday was her funeral.

Before the service, our family was given one final opportunity to say goodbye before they closed and sealed her casket.

That was probably the hardest moment for me.

I knew Grandma was gone before then, obviously. But there’s something painfully final about watching a casket close.

Suddenly there isn’t another minute.

There isn’t another opportunity to look at her.

There isn’t another goodbye.

This is it.

They closed the casket, and we began her service.

And it was beautiful.

It was something I believe Grandma would have been proud of her children for putting together. I like to imagine her watching all of us, smiling at some parts and probably laughing at others.

And maybe Grandpa was beside her.

The Things Grief Doesn’t Take

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why losing Grandma reopened something in me that had been sitting quietly for 16 years.

I think when I was younger, I believed grief worked almost like an illness.

Something terrible happens. You hurt for a while. Eventually you heal. And then you’re supposed to be done.

I’m starting to realize grief doesn’t really work that way.

Maybe grief isn’t something we finish.

Maybe it’s something that changes shape.

At first, it takes up the entire room. It’s impossible to ignore because everything reminds you of the person who isn’t there anymore.

Then, slowly, life begins growing around it.

You make new memories. You laugh again. You celebrate birthdays and holidays. You get married. You have children. You go to school and work and spend entirely too much money at the grocery store.

Life keeps moving, even when there was once a part of you that couldn’t imagine how it possibly could.

Eventually, the grief doesn’t feel quite as enormous.

But that doesn’t mean it’s gone.

Every once in a while, something opens the door.

A song.

A photograph.

An old recliner.

A Winnie the Pooh book.

Or another goodbye.

And suddenly, there you are again.

At Grandma’s viewing, I think part of me became that 10-year-old girl again. The little girl who walked next door and somehow had to comprehend that one of her best friends was dying.

Sixteen years had passed, but grief didn’t seem particularly interested in that.

For a while, I’ve been bothered by how little I can remember about Grandpa.

How can someone have been such a huge part of my childhood and yet be so difficult for me to remember?

I wish I could remember more.

I wish I could remember more conversations. More afternoons at their house. More things he said to me. More ordinary moments that I had absolutely no idea I would someday desperately want back.

But maybe I’ve been looking for him in the wrong places.

Because when I really think about it, Grandpa is everywhere.

I see him in my dad.

Grandpa was the kind of person who would lend a helping hand whenever someone needed it, and my dad is exactly the same way. Somewhere along the line, Grandpa taught his children what it meant to show up for people, and they carried that with them.

Grandma did the same.

If someone needed to be fed, she fed them.

If someone needed somewhere to belong, there was room.

And no matter how difficult her own life became, somehow the answer was always:

“I’m doing great.”

My grandparents raised ten children and taught them to love each other deeply. They taught them that family mattered. They taught them to help people. They taught them to travel and experience the world.

Then those ten children grew up.

They had children of their own.

And they passed those things down to us.

Now we’re growing up, too.

Some of us have children of our own.

And suddenly I realize that things my grandparents believed decades ago are still moving through our family.

Maybe one day my kids will help someone because they watched me do it.

Maybe they’ll grow up knowing that family is something worth protecting.

Maybe they’ll want to travel and experience the world because that’s something my parents taught me, because it’s something their parents taught them.

And my kids may never completely understand where those pieces of themselves came from.

But I’ll know.

They came from Grandma and Grandpa.

There’s something comforting about that.

Because death took a lot from me.

It took Grandpa when I was only 10.

It took years with him that I wish I could have had.

It took Grandma 16 years later.

And time has taken memories that I desperately wish I could get back.

But there are some things grief doesn’t get to take.

It doesn’t get to take the kindness they put into this world.

It doesn’t get to take the things they taught their children.

It doesn’t get to take the pieces of them that live inside my parents, my siblings, my cousins, me, and now another generation of children who will grow up carrying little pieces of two people they may never fully realize helped shape them.

And it certainly doesn’t get to take the love.

I may never remember every afternoon I spent next door.

I can’t remember every conversation with Grandpa or every time I climbed that willow tree. I can’t replay those ordinary days and appreciate them the way I wish I could now.

But I remember how it felt to be there.

I remember that Grandma and Grandpa were my best friends.

I remember that I was loved.

And I remember loving them.

Maybe that’s why Grandma’s funeral brought Grandpa rushing back to me after all these years.

Maybe grief wasn’t reminding me only of what I’d lost.

Maybe it was reminding me of what I’d had.

Two grandparents who lived right next door.

A snack pantry I could raid whenever I wanted.

A giant willow tree.

A shelf full of Winnie the Pooh books.

A grandpa in his driver’s cap with his Diet Coke and his EIRMC water jug.

A grandma who could be struggling tremendously and still tell you she was doing great.

A home I could walk to whenever I wanted and two people inside who loved me.

I would give almost anything to walk down to that house as that little girl one more time.

But I can’t.

What I can do is carry them forward.

Grandma spent 16 years without Grandpa.

She died on their 76th anniversary.

And while losing her reopened a part of my grief that I thought had healed a long time ago, it also reminded me that grief and love are tied together in a strange way.

We hurt this deeply because we got to love someone that deeply.

So maybe I don’t need to remember every moment to know how important they were.

Some of their stories might fade.

Some of my memories might remain fuzzy.

There may always be pieces of my childhood with Grandpa that I wish I could reach but can’t.

But the things they gave us are still here.

They’re in my dad.

They’re in me.

And now, they’re making their way into my children.

Grief may have a long memory.

But love, apparently, has an even longer one.