BY JOANNA C. VALENTE
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this piece originally appeared in the writer’s newsletter.
Is anyone good at grief, at goodbyes from one part of your life to another? In some ways, we are often grieving all the little changes that happen everyday, whether it’s a new job, loss of a job, a friend moving, a loved one passing, the end of a relationship.
Some of these losses are bigger than others, hurt more than others. Some are like broken dishes, the shards falling everywhere, in the tiny crevices between kitchen tiles. You don’t always notice those shards, but sometimes you step on them. Some, however, are the collapse of an entire building. You notice that emptiness, that change, everyday.
Change isn’t always intrinsically negative. I can’t always tell if I hate change more than other people, or if we all just dread change, but don’t admit it. I am a person who loves routine, even if that routine could be better. It’s hard for me to want to move beyond into something else, even if I’ve learned to force myself.
Most of all, I’ve learned I don’t always have words or language. Lately, I’ve been trying to teach myself to sit in stillness to find the right ones, let them form and come to life.
*
Over the past few weeks, Yiayia had been in the hospital and now she's in rehab. There's a chance she might never go home. This fills me with profound sadness. This is a sadness we all know, but like the shards, it’s always there. These shards are big and they hurt.
There's so much processing. So much loss. The end of an era. Grief before grief. Grief before grief is a difficult ghost to reckon with.
Am I good at reckoning with this ghost, this especially difficult ghost? Am I good at pushing through this ghost to another place without the ghost? No one, of course, is “good at grief,” but I want to be. This is the kind of grief you feel before you know another an even worse grief is going to come, like a bad storm. You go to the grocery store to stock up on nonperishables, to prepare. This feels the same.
And because of COVID-19, there is a part of me that can't help but think: What if I never see her again?
And even if/when I do, what will it be like? We lock people inside our heads and hearts, with time passing through us, rather than us passing through time. Because of this, we lock people inside the human suit they wear. But, really, don't we transcend this? Why isn't this always apparent?
While the thought of transcendence can make grief's pain lessen a bit, we also live in a world where we want tangible experiences. I want to see Yiayia, I want to smell zucchini bread baking in her house, in the kitchen with the yellow wallpaper and assortment of teapots and floral paintings on the wall - and that sandy wood table, I want to hug her.
You know what I mean?
*
We all live in the present even if other times come crashing in. Those times are hard to reckon with, sometimes. These flashes of moments, like the ones of us going on walks to the local cemetery, to Carvel, to witness the trees lining our favorite block, come and go. They are here and now, and they are also other times past.
I want us both in those moments to be that she and I right now. Maybe we still are. Does it even matter? We submit and surrender to these times and memories, to rituals we create to remember, to inhabit. There are so many things of hers I have that are friendly little ghosts living in my apartment, on my body when I wear them and carry them to other places.
In phone conversations I’ve had with her lately, she mentions how my sister and I need to go to her house and take things we want. She doesn’t want these objects to go forgotten, to go to strangers. She cries when she says this. She cries when she tells us not to forget her. I cry silently so she doesn’t hear, and tell her that of course we will go to her house.
We all cry, silently and not silently. We don’t know what to say, so we often don’t say much. When she does, she fondly recalls memories of our childhood. We all wish we could pass through that time again. There’s a vulnerability and power in admitting you are at a loss.
*
After keeping a banana for too long, my kitchen is home to fruit flies. I do the old trick, put apple cider vinegar in a bowl with a few drops of dish soap. I read online this works because it drowns the flies. Part of me feels guilty attracting them to death, attracting so much death, of creating a death pool of flies in my kitchen.
I think about Yiayia as I do this, because she hates killing bugs because they are living things. I remember her beetle broach, the different pins of insects she collected over the years; one year, I gifted her a vintage broach of a ladybug.
These objects are things you’d find at a flea market and think little of, pass over them without thought, and yet I can’t help but think of all the meaning they inhabit, that they’ve gained by osmosis over time.
What is meaning other than what we assign, than the rituals we choose to keep? For most of my life, Yiayia would feed stray cats on her back patio; sometimes as many as five cats would show up for their meals at a time. I used to think, as a child, that she was just a cat lady, a lover of all creatures, but now I realize this ritual was just as much for her as it was for them.
This ritual of caring, of mothering, of each day holding these acts of love for others.
*
I don't want or need to be the best of anything. Except loving you.
*
I pull a Tarot card and it’s The Hanged Man. I have become my own barrier. What rituals should I be creating and maintaining?
We rarely ever get closure in one moment; we aren’t owed closure. We have to find it for ourselves, a series of choices we make, an outcome we decide and give rather than take. As I think about her not possibly returning home, about her being 97 in this moment, the inevitably of her death, I realize how much I want to control the narrative.
When we pull Tarot cards or try to speak to the unseen, dead or undead or living, we often have an outcome in mind. We want to fit what we experience into this outcome, this narrative we’ve planned, like we’re all novelists and this is the first draft. But I can’t be dishonest, I can’t only interpret what I want to interpret.
But we can’t control these outcomes. I can’t. No one is that powerful. That’s what I’m learning: We are powerless through change and grief except that we aren’t. I can’t control the narrative, but I can control my routines, my rituals, my reactions, my growth. These are all things I know but I don’t really understand, at least, not all the time.
There is no ending to this except that I am trying to surrender and submit to what I can’t control, and take ownership over what I can. There is no ending to grief or loss or change. It’s all fluid and I have to be here for that.
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. They are the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Sexting Ghosts, Xenos, No(body), #Survivor: A Photo Series (forthcoming), and A Love Story (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021). They are the editor of A Shadow Map: Writing by Survivors of Sexual Assault and the illustrator of Dead Tongue (Yes Poetry, 2020). They received their MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and Joanna is the founder of Yes Poetry and the senior managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine.