On Ceremonies of Loss (An Obituary)

About three weeks ago I went down the shore to attended my maternal grandmother's burial. She was my last living grandparent and died in fall 2020.

My grandmother had a hard life. She never talked about herself, so what I know I through the rest of the family. She was the third of seven girls, was born in Chicago in 1924, and grew up in or around Jacksonville, Florida. Since there were no boys, she often took on responsibilities or tasks that typically befell a male child, or so I'd heard. I don't really know what this means, but assume it is related to physical labor.

I don't know much about her childhood, but I do know one story: a man was interested in marrying one of her sisters. The sister asked this man for a token of some kind and so he gave her a gold cross. My great aunt gave that cross to my grandmother and then broke off the engagement.

My grandmother left high school after the eleventh grade, married at 17, and had her first child at 19. She had five children that made it to adulthood. She was the breadwinner of the family. She started as a line worker in a factory and eventually became a foreman. I know she worked for a toy company (Creative Playthings) and then later a lightbulb company.

Naturally, I only knew her as an old woman. She lived in the same two bedroom trailer that my mother grew up in for most of her life. She only moved out of that trailer when her landlord offered to sell her a much newer one for an absurdly cheap price. The landlord was the son of the prior landlord and grew up in the one house in the park with my mom, so he knew my grandmother well. This wasn't charity though: another tenant had recently died, leaving behind a decent trailer that unfortunately smelled like cat urine, with no one to claim it. The landlord knew that my grandmother's trailer was starting to rot and that if he waited until she passed, it would cost him money to remove it. I don't actually recall the trailer smelling that bad, but by that point I was in college and not visting much.

The summer before I started my PhD program, I was briefly in New York for a contract gig. I decided to tack a visit to my grandmother to the end of the trip; I hadn't been back to New Jersey since before my parents moved to Maine, four or five years prior. I remember asking her if she would come up to Massachusetts to visit me and she responded, "Oh Emma, Nanny's too old." (She frequently referred to herself in the third person and prounced my name A-ma, where the "A" is pronounced like you're saying the letter, it's definitely a dipthong, and it's drawn out.) I asked if she would come up for my hooding and explained what that was. She gave a tired "maybe." Then I asked if she would come up if I got married and she perked up and said, "of course."

I last saw my grandmother in summer of 2012. I forget the reason, but my mother was heading back down to New Jersey and was anxious about the trip. I offered to go with her for moral support. I met one of my mother's cousins who worked as a laborer with grandfather; he said he remembered me as a child, but I had no recollection of him. My mother later relayed to me that she still didn't know if he knew that he was adopted.

My mother and my one cousin who still lived in New Jersey, Debi, would repeatedly offer to have my grandmother come to live with each of them. Every time she would decline. Shortly after that she moved back to Florida, to live with her eldest child.

At some point in 2020, my mother relayed that she thought my grandmother was dying. It was hard to get information then. My grandmother was old, so she would not have been a priority during the pandemic. That said, my mother could be a little superstitious, so honestly I didn't really believe her without further evidence. My brothers and I all kind of thought Nanny would live forever.

I defended my dissertation in late August of 2020. In September I recieved a card from her congratulating me. I was moved — she frequently confused my birthday with other cousins' birthdays and generally did not seem interested in my life. It had been so long since I'd seen her or spoken with her. I meant to ask my mother for her number, but I was busy and never got around to it. Not long after, she died.

Even now as I write this, I feel overwhelmed with sadness about this. That card is tucked behind my framed degree. I feel a deep sense of shame and regret for not having reached out while she was still alive. When I spoke with my mother, she said I shouldn't feel guilty about it because my grandmother was showing signs of dementia and likely would not have understood what was happening even if I did call. What my mother didn't understand was that I didn't feel guilty about not calling or showing gratitude; I felt shame because prior to that moment I had been convinced that I wouldn't be sad when she did die, and I hated the idea that in choosing callousness, I had shut off any possibility of a different kind of relationship with my grandmother. I didn't like what that said about me.

I imagine these kinds of complicated feelings are why we, as humans, have developed ceremonies of loss in the first place. During Covid, there were no ceremonies: each day was the same, yet somehow worse, and all the highs and lows flattened into a kind of unreality. It was hard to make new and meaningful connections. Even when people started spending time together again, it often felt like it was impossible to have any kind of real conversation. Even those who seemed to fare relatively well during that time appeared to have less interest in the lives of others.

When my mom told me they were finally burying my grandmother's urn, I told her I wanted to go. She said I didn't have to. My brothers weren't going. I know at least one of my brothers felt similarly to me about my grandmother's role in our mother's life, and he had moved on from that side of the family long ago. There was some discussion in our family after my grandmother's death about whether any of us would attend a funeral. However, at this point it had been so long since her death and so long since I'd been back, and her loss was so deeply tied to a uniquely difficult time in my life, that I felt I had to go.

I was bit nervous; I hadn't seen most my mother's side of the family in well over twenty years. I was worried we would end up sitting around, talking about how great she was, trying to rewrite history. I was worried that my uncles would say something cruel to my mother.

Instead, I saw a family pay their respects with honesty. My aunt, whom my grandmother lived with in her last days, did not come. It was a small gathering: three of the four living children, two of the dozen or more grandchildren, and some spouses. The plot was one that my uncle had purchased over forty years ago. There were three spots: the first was for his daughter, who died at age 13. I never knew that cousin. The other two plots were for his parents, my grandparents.

As we sat around the table I watched my family, now a bunch of senior citizens, reminisce about their childhood. It was equal parts tragedy and comedy, them laughing at the absurdity of life and through their pain. They're an odd bunch and for the first time in my life, for better or for worse, I saw myself as one of them. This was not what I'd expected: for the whole of my life, I'd seen myself as wholely one of my father's family. I remember telling my mother that sharing genetic material doesn't make you family. And yet, as I looked at these people's faces, I saw my own features. As I listened to their socially awkward banter, I heard myself. I think I saw these things when I was much younger, but I didn't like them and so I tried to deny them. This time, rather than seeing things I didn't like, I saw people who persisted and grew, despite immense adversity. They're by no means perfect (who is?), but there was a complexity to these people — my family — that I hadn't seen before. I had a chance to reconnect with my cousin and gain some perspective on my immediate family that I hadn't considered before. For the time in a very long time, I felt like one of many. It's a feeling I've missed.

I wanted to write about this publicly because I think a lot more people are still processing grief from the past five years than they realize. I'd previously written about loss during graduate school and someone had reached out to me to tell me they'd come across the post, had experienced something similar, and that it had touched them. One of things we lose without ceremonies of loss is this sort of weak social tie, i.e., the strangers who are processing something similar. These often fleeting ties make us feel like we are part of society, and help us to accept loss as just part of life. And so, I write this post, tears streaming down my face and snot oozing out of my nose, in hopes of releasing the grieving process for myself as well as others.