It’s not a date I usually remember, and yet, last night, I suddenly missed him with a crisp clarity. He was such a gentle, good man – perhaps the only good man I have ever known.
I sometimes tell myself that I sense him around me, willing him to look out for me like he did when I was a little girl with pigtails. I sometimes smell him in a candle.
I remember that grey morning when my mom woke me to tell me of his passing in the night. It seems to me as if Aprils were colder back then. Maybe it was just my insides that felt so cold that day.
I went to school, and did my homework. The news temporarily ended one of those mindless teenage feuds I had with a friend. We were reconciled by our shared grief.
I remember my confusion when I was told to tell my grandmother that “I was sorry for her loss”. The phrase did not make sense to me – surely the loss was all of ours collectively, and such a premeditated sentence only inserted a distance between her loss and my own, diminished mine by virtue of my position in the family.
I remember the well of tears that flowed when I, the most compliant child in the world, finally uttered the sentence as I was instructed.
Then there was no distance, only loss.
I remember eating an entire loaf of bread that afternoon, effectively ending the bout of anorexia I indulged in that year. Maybe that’s why I felt so cold. No body fat, just fine translucent hair covering my body, and grief.
That was the first time I consciously ate my feelings.
What I still don’t say, even after all these years, is that I have regrets.
There was a couple of weeks before he died where I didn’t speak to him. I was in a teenage funk, and never got to say goodbye.
But I never allowed myself to be eaten by this guilt, because I knew he loved me, and forgave me everything before I even trespassed.
In a perfect world, God is like my grandpa.
Mirrors, masks, fists and hearts 