This Is What It Is Like
Everything you never wanted to know about grieving and were afraid to ask.
You are just going to go the store.
You are just going to go to the bar to have a taco.
You are just doing the thing you would have done Before. But now everything is different.
Early in my grief journey, I go to the grocery store to buy food. It is a difficult thing now. Because the grocery store contains his ghosts. There are the Sumo oranges he consumed so gleefully this time last year that you’d never heard of before he discovered them. There are the pineapples, mocking you from their shelf. He told you how to tell if a pineapple is ripe or not. You didn’t know. (Pluck the leaf and smell the freshness, look for the golden colors on the outside). There are the eggs, triple A and double A and A. You know the difference now because of him.
There is the lane where he stood waiting for you to be done shopping, coming back from the house to rescue you from your hypoglycemic fog; he knows you’ve gotten lost in the grocery store and he is here to help carry the groceries home.
You burst into tears, because you can see him so clearly, standing there, his olive green plaid flannel shirt, his green loungey shorts. No judgement, patiently waiting for you. You remember.
Many months later, I am at the bar around the corner from my house having two tacos and a glass of wine and reading a book that has nothing to do with the work that I have to do. Pearl Jam is playing. In Seattle. In a grungy bar. And you think, “Oh, come on. At least play Mother Love Bone.”
It’s the first album, the album that you liked, and one of the reasons you wanted to see what Seattle was like. It is loud and it is hard to read, because it is demanding you pay attention to it. You are not thinking about him, the person who died. You are trying very hard not too, in fact. You are reading a book about a little girl who claims she is an alien, who befriends two loners in the south. It is called Where the Forest Meets the Stars.
Eddie Vedder is demanding that you pay attention to him. He is singing “Alive,” the song, the first hit, one you have heard for 25 years and never thought about with anything other than fondness and nostalgia. And then it happens.
You remember.
You chose the song for his memorial video, the one his father made for the funeral; you did your own cut so that it was more personalized, with music that he liked, music you listened to together, music that seemed to suit him. You chose “Alive,” for part of the video, the second half where it shows a slideshow of his life. By now he’s in his late teens and early 20s, he’s in the military, the first time, he’s in the woods hiking, he’s with you, he’s alive. “I’m still alive, “ Eddie sings. And this is how you start crying in public. It’s very simple, really.
You remember.
A song plays and you are down the rabbit hole, the one you’ve been trying to avoid.
A moment passes, and you collect your thoughts, and try to focus. The song ends, and you return to your book. With grief brain, you have a hard time focusing and concentrating. Your already bad memory is even worse now. You forget words, phrases, concepts—a scary prospect, since you are a writer. It takes a long time to read books, now. Even longer than it did when you were just a regular person addicted to Twitter.
The book is set somewhere in the South. The protagonists are a sort of city girl, and a sort of country boy. They are playing against stereotypes. They remind you of you and him, a little bit. He’s smarter than she expects, and teaches her things. They are an unlikely pair. As you keep reading, you realize that it takes place not far from where he lived in Southern Illinois. You’ve seen this part of the country now, twice. Once at his funeral, and again, when you went to see his grave. The flatlands, the bugs, the humidity, it is familiar now, for all the wrong reasons.
And it’s happened again.
You are just trying to read a book. And you remember.