#12 Grieving
about love that has nowhere to go
TW: Grief, death of a loved one, death of a young person, unexpected family death
I lost one of my cousins about six days ago, back home in Venezuela. He was 31. He had a heart defect when he was born; when he was only a year and a half years old, he went to Boston Children's Hospital to receive heart surgery. After that, he led a relatively normal life before his heart gave out.
We grew up together, my cousins and I - our aunts and uncles each had a handful of kids and that made us into a big band of all ages, all intertwined with each other, taking trips to the beach, celebrating Christmases, birthdays, welcoming the new year together. Some of us were around the same age while others had a seven year gap, but it didn't matter. We were together and we flowed in and out of conversations, jokes, stories, laughter. Without knowing it back then, my cousins helped me understand the importance of community. How learning from your elders and supporting those younger than you can be as simple as conversations around the dinner table, talking about the latest dilemma, going through heartbreak, navigating immigration, whether I'd learned to speak Dutch yet. Our aunts and uncles sitting nearby, talking and laughing. All of us there, close, alive.
One thing about immigration I feel no one ever really talks about is facing grief and death from afar. My cousin is the third loss I face from across the ocean, but the most unexpected, and the youngest in our family to go in my lifetime. My grief is so abstract. So disjointed. I almost envy my family back home, how physical their grief is, how communal it is, the way that they can hold each other through the unimaginable pain of it, the physical loss of it so immediate, so confronting. I wake up earlier than them each day, five hours ahead. I check our groupchat as photos of us together, of our cousin, stream in. They share little anecdotes and videos and then — without any warning — my sister sends me photos of the room where his wake was held, bouquets of roses and flowers lining every single wall. I can't touch the flowers, can't smell the roses, I can't touch the casket. I can't sing to him as he's laid to rest. I can't see his face. And maybe this is what I am grateful for; remembering him as it was, with me, here, laughing and talking. My last memory of him is at new year's eve, taking photos together, he tells me he's in love. He smiles, eyes glinting with adoration. I ask whether he will go see her tonight, he nods.
And now there's no more of him here, no more of him in the future. And for a few days it's easier for me to pretend that it's not true. In Amsterdam, the days continue and people hit the terrasje and there's sunlight streaming in on Sunday, a rarity in the cloudy week ahead. Young people swarm into bars and there's a buzz of energy and laughter everywhere I go. The world is still spinning, people are biking to work, I keep waking up. Monday comes, then Tuesday. I briefly wonder if they could just go back into his body and just change his heart, if they could just replace it then he would wake up again. I notice how this is the first time I have such a thought about death. How in the previous times I grieved, it felt painful but like a natural end — grandfathers in their 70s and 80s, men who lived long lives, and it made sense — and none of this did. You're not supposed to die at thirty-one. You're supposed to live.
Amsterdam continues just like it always does.
I think about how grief is another way to love. I think about how grief is another way to learn. What do I need? What do I want? Can I accept that this is the reality that's been handed to us?
I think about what one of my aunts said over the phone after the news broke. How his soul had to leave this body behind. How he would find another body, and his soul would come in another form, another story. I wonder if that's what I believe, or if I believe in some concept of Heaven or place where the people we love go once they've left us. I wonder if he can hear me when I talk about him, or if he knows how much I wish it wasn't true. And then I notice something else, which is painfully obvious now — with a sudden death, or an unexpected loss, the pain is not left with the dead to go through. It's left with the living to live with.
I wonder how his girlfriend feels. How her love is changing, transmuting, how her grief will evolve over time. If it ever does. Or if it's a gradual moving between different feelings and then one day it becomes bearable to live next to. How grief is love with nowhere to go. How growing your own heart to live alongside the grief is probably more accurate than ever reaching a state of acceptance. How I'd rather believe his soul, the energy he's made of, is still here, just more scattered. How he's shapeshifted to a different realm where we can't see it, but we can feel it. I think about so many things.
Mostly, I think about his integrity. How smart he was. How quietly ambitious. How I never saw him mad. I think about the chances he had in life; how his chest had to be cut open when he was a small child. How he grew up and so did the line along his chest, vertical, how none of our parents explained to us that it was a miracle he was alive, with us. How maybe they protected us from thinking of something like life and death and mortality and just let us play in the pool and swim in the sea and laugh at the dinner table instead. How I know one day I may have to protect my kids from those things, maybe other things, maybe these same things.
I think about how I love him. I think about the past 8 years. I think about how, in another version of this life, I stayed in Venezuela. About growing up close to each other. About getting older with him beside us. About his girlfriend and about meeting her, about maybe one day the kids he'd have. I think about how I love him, and how that remains even after I can't reach him anymore. I think about how that love is what it is, its solid quality, its permanence beyond all other things.
I think about what I will do with the time I have ahead of me now. I think about if one day I turn thirty-one. I think about what I will ask him then, in my head. How to be. What to remember. What advice to carry with me.
I think about how I love him.