Yesterday would have been grandpa’s birthday. He passed in February. Here we are from last year. On the one hand I feel so validated that I took so many videos of him towards the end. On the other I feel so distrustful of my mind, guilty even, how much I forget, how pathetic it is that I require visual prompts. That specific memories become muffled over time, like a bad internet connection.
Photos both leave evidence and eviscerate it. Each one is both a portal and a trap door. I worry about the moments I didn’t capture. I worry about my reliance on these imperfect tools. I worry about my reliance on perfect grief. I worry about making a complex person a constellation of memories, what about the everyday modes of relating?
I miss that quiet, I covet it. My grief is idiosyncratic. One moment i am obnoxiously self-assured, whimsical in my musings about how people don’t end they become something else. The next I feel this all-consuming panic about the loss of that kind of security, that kind of love. How am I supposed to navigate this thing without him? How without him becomes synonymous with alone.
All of this strikes me as the crisis of translation: how do we convert reality into representation? How do we communicate the extent of our love and our grief? What becomes of us without bodies? I suppose “can’t” and “I don’t know” and “maybe” are candles at the altar of grief.
I get that it’s about surrender that it’s a lifelong process, these are the things i know. But selfishly I want to hold onto the mourning because then part of him is still here. These are things I feel. What I can tell you for sure is I read a Baldwin quote today that made me weep because it reminded me of him: “A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of success. But the man behind the label knows defeat far more intimately than he knows triumph. He can never be absolutely certain that he has achieved his intention.”
I suppose then for both of us — writers — the move is simultaneously cultivating intention and surpassing certainty. It feels impossible, but then again, so was he.
