I am going to write about the last thing that I want to write about. I am going to write about it because I can’t write about anything else.

I am going to write about it because it is, as I myself put it in another essay, “in my blood. My piss. My guts. It turns my intestines inside out. I would need galaxies to contain it.” Maybe it’s pretentious to quote your own work. But I don’t really care about pretentiousness or the perceptions of others right now. Grief strips you down to your most basic human parts; guts, pain, hunger, anger, longing, and love. Always love. 

When I was five or six, I told my mom for the first time that I wanted to be a writer. For many years, that became my consummate answer to the ever-present question of, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” That was until I noticed the wrinkle between adult’s eyebrows, and I realized that a writer was not a very practical thing to want to be. Not like a teacher, or a dentist, or even a scientist. That was when I started saying that I wanted to be a vet, or a zoologist, or a librarian. But secretly, etched in the deepest crevices of my heart, was the word “writer,” and I made a pact to myself that that was what I was and what I would always be. 

To be a writer is to be something ephemeral; a keeper of words, a recorder of emotions. As Natalie Goldberg writes in Writing Down the Bones, “This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.” I keep coming back to quotes lately. Perhaps it’s because I do not have words for the magnitude of what I am feeling. 

The point that I am dancing around is that I did not know when I made this pact with writing all of those years ago that the thing that I would spend most of my life writing about was loss. It is the thing that has colored most of my becoming. The loss of my Grandma Babe when I was fourteen, a blow that tore my life into two and left me across the country, chasing her shadow through hunger pangs and between the blades of a razor. The loss of my Pappy when I was twenty-two, which left me in bed, clutching his picture and crying out for him, drinking cheap bottles of champagne to sleep. The loss of my father when I was twenty-five, the suddenness and not-suddenness of it, the longing for a version of him and my life with him that has never and will never exist. 

And now the loss of my beloved grandfather. I never called him anything so formal as  grandfather. I called him grandpa, or Big Al, a nickname that made him laugh. I still remember his laugh. The way he’d sometimes slap his leg and say, “Ah, shit, that’s funny. I don’t care who you are!” I still have him saved in my phone under that moniker, pinned at the top of my text messages and call logs with all of the other people that I communicate with most often. I’ve been sending him text messages. I’ve been staring at his picture on my wall, from when he was about fourteen and still so full of life and promise. I’ve been wondering where it all went wrong. What I could have done to change things. 

A month ago, Grandpa Allan died.

Like everyone alive at this moment, he was an amalgamation of so many things, a walking contradiction. He was patient yet he was stubborn. He was funny yet I sometimes found his sense of humor out-dated and problematic. He was kind yet he could have a sharp tongue. He was there for me as much as he could be yet sometimes it didn’t feel like enough. He was sinner, and he was saint. Above all, he was loved and he loved. More than he ever knew, probably. And through it all, he was the best man that I’ve ever known. He taught me what it meant to have the love of a father. He taught me what it meant to be human. 

We understood each other better than most. We were two quiet sensitive souls wrapped up in the packaging of a lot of barbed jokes and stubbornness. We both felt, as he was fond of quoting, “lost in the supermarket.” We both didn’t know why other people couldn’t understand us sometimes, and we both struggled to relate to people sometimes. We both expressed ourselves better in writing than talking. We both felt like aliens sometimes. We both felt like this was our first time and our last time on this earth. We spent so much time in the humidity of his upstairs study, talking about books and music and life and death and reincarnation and religion and politics and love. Always, everything circled back to love. I understood him, until I didn’t, and then I tried to understand him again. I know he did the same for me. Perhaps this understanding is the thing that love is made of. 

I don’t know how I have gotten through this last month without him, to be honest. Time has felt like a porous thing. It splits and it divides. The days feel long and short at once. My brain is in a deep fog. I lose things, and then I break down to my boyfriend about how I keep losing things. We both know the subtext. This time last year, I wrote about the porousness of July, of things slipping through the cracks. Now, I cannot believe that my grandfather is another thing that I have lost. I hate writing that he “was” anything. He should still be something. He should exist outside of pictures and memories and funny stories. When I visit his house, I can’t bring myself to open up the books that he left bookmarks in, to see the pages that he was reading. I suppose that’s life. Sometimes people die in the middle of the books that they were reading, in the middle of sentences. Sometimes people leave, as he did, in the middle of an ordinary Thursday. But there is still so much that I want to say, so much that it seems deeply unfair and just plain wrong that I can never say. 

So here I am again, at this work that I made a promise to myself that I would do back when I was six and thought that I’d only ever write stories where the princess saved herself. Back when my biggest problem was which way my heroine would slay her dragon this time. Here I am again, as I seem to every three years, writing about grief. Grief. Such a small word for such a large feeling. My body is too small for this feeling. My chest hurts without explanation. My ribcage feels like it is missing a piece. I sometimes wonder how I continue to breathe. I am spirit sick. Spirit tired. I understand the Christian ethos of being made from a rib now. Grandpa Allan was a soulmate of a kind. A kindred spirit. We had a bond that was deeper than what I can express, typing away at my keyboard. And yet I keep trying. I have to keep trying. 

Of all the things for my mind to hinge itself upon, to pull open like a door, of all of the sweet memories and all of the bad ones, this is what I keep coming back to. Standing at the bottom of the stairs that led to his “study,” the room where he played guitar and read and meditated and thought and wrote. Calling up them, “Grandpa!” Him, yelling back, “Yeah!” Me, climbing them two at a time. Sitting on the floor while he sat on the old sofa, or sitting on the sofa while he sat at his computer desk, a guitar in hand. Talking about God and life and books and music and the essay that I had to write and the day that I had at work and the advice he had for me. Sometimes, my cat would run up the stairs too, sitting on my lap and purring as we spoke. Sometimes, we laughed. Sometimes, one of us cried. Sometimes, we read. Sometimes, we sat in silence as the heaviness of the day stunned us. Always, we had each other. 

Now, I carry him with me. His kindness. His gentleness. His stubborn hope and optimism. His stubborn love. His stubborn everything. I carry him in the dimple on my left cheek, a trait that has carried on from his face to my mother’s to mine. In the curve of my smile. I carry him in every pore and every bone in my body. To paraphrase a quote yet again, “I carry his heart. I carry it in my heart.” 

Lately, I have been reflecting on the poetry of Leonard Cohen, which he said described his life so well. I think it maybe describes all of our lives, and the meaning that we make out of this little pocket of time that we get with the ones that we love. 

“Like a bird on the wire / Like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried in my way to be free.” 

I hope that wherever you are now, Big Al, you are free. 

I know that you’d be embarrassed by me writing about you, memorializing you so publicly. I know you’d hate to hear people say nice things about you. You’d find it all so embarrassing and overwhelming. You never gave yourself enough credit. I also know that you supported my writing. That you bought everything that I ever published. I know that you wanted to see me publish a book. I know that you’d want me to keep sharing. And so I will. I will share about you and your life and your love, and that way maybe, even if just for that moment, we will make our ways back to one another, messy and bruised and tired and forgiven.