I first learned about The Other Side at that dining table antiqued with anguish. That one where
we would pound our fists and carve our nails into the brittle wood, wishing we could make the
emotional pain physical.
I had heard about it before in Church, this place the energy from our palms reached when we
exalted Him. We held His personification in gratitude, in impermanence. People I knew of
distantly were there, surrounded by light and everyone they ever loved. People I didn’t know
were somewhere else, certainly in a bleak solitude, perhaps even tortured from the darkness.
Somewhere in between was where I came from, from dust I was told. To dust I would return.
Still, I didn’t understand it in my soul until that dreary Tuesday night when my mom offered me
lemon bars and a chance to stay up later than my sister. I don’t remember it well, just flashes of
her voice and the feeling of my nails in the wood. She was crying, I wasn’t. I told her I was fine
and then banged my head in the pillow until I felt its tenderness. What was this feeling, what was
this promise of a life?
What happens when you are a mother, and you are forced to unravel a new world of devastation
onto your daughter? What happens when you can’t get through it, when your own grief takes
over your soul and you can’t speak? What happens when, in the days after, you grieve her loss
more than she does, when you worry too much that she will never get over it? What happens
when she can’t get over it, when she still feels it in her heart and her bones every time she thinks
about it ten years later? What does a mother do then?
That first night, I didn’t know it would become a pattern, that lemon bars would take on a
brooding meaning, that staying up late meant another talk. I didn’t know that friends dying
would define my early years, that the tear stains would remain on the violet pillowcase in the top
bunk of my sister’s bed, where I slept when I couldn’t be alone, usually when I couldn’t fathom
living my life without someone who was gone.
The next time it was lemon bars again. Dad was on the phone; she couldn’t do it alone this time.
It was a closer friend, someone who I had shared a bed with just three weeks before on a school
trip. Slowly, I would forget what it felt like to connect with her, physically then emotionally. I
would forget whether she snored, whether she kicked in her sleep. I would try for years to
remember every second with her, every time we spoke or shared a look. I would detest myself,
bang my head against that same pillow, as the memories started to fade, as the memories of
conversations I once knew every word to were obscured.
I kept the only gift I had from her on the top shelf of my closet for six years. It was an extensive
watercolor set, with three palettes and two synthetic brushes I wore thin. Occasionally I would
take it out, look at it, and see how much dust had taken it over. Each time, it ended with me
sobbing on the floor, guilty that this dusty watercolor set was my only tangible memory of
someone I spoke to every day for four years. That the energy between us had culminated into a
dusty, old watercolor set.
The third time, it was just a sick fucking joke. Dad was there, and we all knew the drill. No
baked good necessary. An entire family had been taken in mere minutes, a brutal plane crash.
My parents were grieving not only for me, but also for their friends this time. As a family, we
were more broken than we had ever been in the days after. I saw dad with tousled hair once a day
when he emerged from his room to eat dry bread for dinner. Mom worked all day and came
home flustered at 10 p.m. I was confused, was this how I was supposed to react? By this time, it
felt routine to me, a melancholy taking over my body for days after, but one that had not yet
forced me into depression.
I finally surrendered to loss, to death. I let it consume my moments and my thoughts. For years, I
worried each day about death. I wondered about the likelihood of my heart stopping or my lungs
collapsing. I couldn’t fall asleep without whispering I will not die I will not die I will not die. I
had a recurring premonition of dying in a car crash, some car coming out of nowhere and
knocking me out of existence. To my shock, it never happened.
I never grieved immediately as a child, not even as the deaths got closer and closer to my heart. I
grieved four, five, six years later when loneliness took over my brain, when I allowed it to
scream at my mother. I measured the continuum in anger, in the anger I felt toward her and
toward God. To God, I screamed at my least favorite Bible verse in my prayers: I have turned my
cheek this way and that way and again and again. Raw is my skin, primal are my protruding
bones. Let this be the last strife, the last gasp for love. To my mom, I screamed aloud simply: I
hate you.
A girl sits in eighth grade math. Pre-Algebra, I believe it was. She looks uncomfortable in her
body, trapped in her mind. I know, somewhere in my body, that that girl is me. I can feel it in my
stomach and the way I remember the year I turned eight with frightening clarity. But I cannot
seem to realize it, that I am the girl that sits in eighth grade math, who is lucky to have forgotten
about lemon bars, even if briefly, and who is even luckier as to not have faced death’s wrath
intimately in five years. I cannot realize it in the way I tell the story about this math class with
distance, the way this story occupies the same type of space in my mind as the book that left me
sobbing alone on the couch four times as a child. I cannot realize it in the way that it only feels
right to tell it in the third person.
—
Last night, that girl learned that her mother has cancer. Her first instinct was anger. She yelled at
her poor mother: You had fucking cancer and didn’t tell me? Her mother told her, Sometimes, it’s
hard to tell people that you’re sick. She stormed off in anger. She didn’t understand. She does
now.
Today, all she can think about is her mother in surgery. There’s a high success rate, she was told.
9 in 10. But all she can think about is that one in ten chance. She looks around in math class and
there are twenty people. Two would die if they were having her mom’s surgery. She thinks of
her friend group sitting around the cluster of desks they push together every morning. Ten
people. One would die. She knows somewhere deep inside her that that’s not how death works,
that it mercies those who only barely need mercying. She knows somewhere inside herself that
she should be rational, that her mom is going to survive, that her mom is lucky for catching it
early. But she cannot find that rational place. All she can find is the whirlpool inside her mind.
12 p.m. arrives; the surgery is supposed to end. She expects a text, a call from her dad: Mom is
out of surgery. No call, no text. 12:15 p.m. arrives. No call, no text. Each second aligns perfectly
with the beating of her heart. Her mouth moves in the shape of one, two, three, four, five, six.
12:30 p.m. arrives. No call, no text. She texts her dad frantically, Any updates? Is she okay? No
response.
For two hours she thinks her mom has died. She skips over anything other than complications
and death. She breaks down. She can no longer recognize her own surroundings. Her mind is in
the hospital, it is with her dead mom, it is not able to control itself. Her body knows it too. She
shakes profusely; she sits on her hands to hide it. She sobs silently, in the way that her classmates
think she is violently shaking, not sobbing. She thinks of dinners with only her dad; she thinks of
each piece of black clothing she owns. She remembers the three funerals she attended when she
was too young. She remembers how death felt when it was stuck in her throat, when she couldn’t
cough it up.
When her sobs have a sound, she runs out of class. Her face is blotchy, her neck painted with the
red dots she gets when she can’t breathe. In the bathroom, she calls her dad. What Dabba? he
asks. Everything is fine. Your mother got out of surgery a while ago.
He forgot to text her. Half of her brain thinks she will never be able to forgive him for this. Half
of her brain remembers that she will always forgive. She does.
I am twelve, fourteen, seventeen, and eighteen when I love people whose grandparents die. I am
those same ages when I am once again reminded of my luck, that I know one day I will have to
face that pain, but that day is not today and not yesterday and not all the days before yesterday. I
comfort, discern, fathom, and cry for my loves in the second person. I come to think of the
deaths of my own grandparents in the second person.
—
You are in your grandmother’s house for Thanksgiving. Heartache has overcome your every
step, your every organ. You are in a desolate fog: the sun shines rarely in your mind. You know
you are here, at a house familiar yet mysterious. You are occupying space on the earth, barely. In
short, you are feeling the effects of the days shortening, of the winter arriving.
Your uncle orders a club soda at the dinner table, and you have learned over the years to not ask
questions. You evade questions about your nose piercing, about why you go to college so far
away. A screaming match erupts. It was political but has evolved into something greater that you
can’t quite place. You don’t know enough information to break down every tense feeling flying
mostly from your uncle and your dad. Everyone pretends nothing happened when it is time for
dessert. Your mom was thinking about making lemon bars, but you begged her not to. Things
feel normal.
But under it all, this time is different. Your grandmother is dying. You see it in the way she
forgets to turn off the stove, the way she tells the same story three times within twenty minutes.
You want to scream when everyone pretends like it’s the first time. Things are not fucking
normal. Am I the only one who sees that? You are almost relieved by the worried looks your
parents share when your grandmother cannot grasp her fork. You know to worry when your dad
and his brother finally talk about it. You can hear them making a plan, considering their options.
A caregiver, a home.
Your first instinct is to pretend it isn’t true. You know she has had times like this before, after
surgeries, after injuries. It will get better; it will mend itself. You only accept it when you drink
too many glasses of wine with her, and it gets worse. She can barely remember your name. You
text your friends through your drunken haze, and it is real.
You hadn’t thought intimately about death since your mom had surgery. You had forgotten what
it felt to feel it linger in your stomach. You have never known its imminence intimately. You
have known about organs and hearts just giving out, giving up. But you have never experienced a
death that promises constant acceptance. Constant acceptance that tomorrow your grandmother
may not be able to hold a glass ever again, that she may never be able to walk to the grocery
store again. But you are forced to accept it, to accept that these are her final years.
That night, you stand in the bathroom and look at yourself. All day people have been telling you
that you are the mirror image of your grandmother. No one has told you this before, and you take
it as a sign. You notice where they are right and where they are wrong. Your noses have the
same little dip on the left side, and you learned today that you have matching moles on your right
cheek. But she has green eyes; yours are blue. She is a natural redhead; you are a tryhard.
You wonder if she knows it too. If she can tell her body is in decay, or if she is denying it. You
wonder at what age you start to accept that you will be gone. You think that you might start
believing in God. You hope your grandmother believes in heaven.