“I had hoped preparation might make the fallout of grief softer; that just talking to family alone would stave off guilt. But you can’t prepare for everything; you can’t ready yourself for the way loss shocks and stuns and debilitates,” writes katchow
Illustration: Jeanne Verdoux There was a phrase that my uncle used to say over and over when my mother — his baby sister — was dying. Even before we knew what was happening. Time is of the essence, he said in September of 2004 as he sat with his siblings in my aunt’s condo in Connecticut, trying to understand why my mother’s body had been giving way.
When I think of a collective sense of grief, I think of how easily I became distant from my mother’s family, including my uncle, during those months and years after her death. As we all mourned, I watched us retreat into ourselves. Still, in isolation, my family was in stasis, unsure what to do with all of our time. So we reached out to one another. My extended family’s sprawling, 19-person group chat that spanned three generations, began ticking with new messages.
Or there were messages from my uncle that I pictured him painstakingly, slowly typing. His texts boiled down to things like this:How long do you think we should leave home delivery groceries outside before bringing them in the house? For the past couple of years, I’ve been working on a memoir about my family’s collective grief, gathering stories from my sisters, father, aunts, and uncles. Conversations about my mother with family, and especially my uncle, often began by discussing her illness and the fallout of her death. But they quickly revealed something — not quite grief, not quite isolation, not quite longing — that we could only talk around, never about.
After all, how could we attempt to steel ourselves for all the ways these American systems have failed us — were never meant for some of us — and have left our loved ones and the most vulnerable to die? It’s the time it takes to learn the answers to questions like this that feel so excruciating; it’s seeing tragedies unfold in slow motion; it’s the plodding approach of an inevitable grief.
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