Love, transforming
When I was five years old, my mother told me that her father visited her in rainbows.
He fought cancer for three years, his once-strong body weakened by bad cells and chemotherapy. The air was cold when we buried him, and the rain didn’t help. I sniffled so much that my scratchy coat sleeve rubbed my nose raw.
I don’t remember his voice, and only know his face through pictures, but I smile when I see a rainbow. I like to think he visits me, too. So you’re up there looking out for me, Paw Paw.
Rainbows come to me when I need them most. I can spot them with ease, no matter how faded the colors are on the murky gray backdrop of clouds. I snap a picture, say “hi, there,” and go on with my day with a lightness in my chest.
“That’s where I love you,” I think. “You’re not alone there, in the sky.”
My father’s mother died when I was fourteen. She was made a grandmother at a young age, her face not yet wrinkled by time and sun exposure. She didn’t think she was old enough to be called any traditional grandparent name. I called her Mim.
“It’s what the British call their grandmothers,” she said.
She had an affinity for British culture. My mom painted her a table with a union jack on it, and she worshiped reality TV so long as they had English accents. Eccentric was probably the best word to describe her. I think having an eccentric Mim is crucial to developing a good personality. She would agree.
Mim died of a heart attack one early December morning. It was two weeks until Christmas. The gifts she bought my sisters and I were neatly wrapped in her bedroom. I still haven’t opened mine for fear of losing what I have left of her. When we cleaned out her apartment, I took her copy of My Life at Grey Gardens and an encyclopedia of British rulers.
She comes to me now as a cardinal, bright red and stark against the Mississippi flora. I don’t see her much, but I turn on a Fleetwood Mac song when I do. She deserves good music, even as a bird.
Sometimes the grief catches up to me at strange times. My grief isn’t reserved for the dead, either. I grieve seeing my mother every day, and the feeling of optimism in my heart. I grieve my nephew’s infancy, and my relationship with my younger sister. I grieve myself.
When it finds me, whether I’m typing away at work or turning in bed, it suffocates the air around me. I cannot listen to Gratitude by Brandon Lake or Lava Lamp by Cuco. I hate the smell of Glossier You. I can’t stomach Mike’s Hard Lemonade.
Sometimes it finds me on a quiet, unremarkable day. Then again, so do rainbows and cardinals. The two used to be one in the same, a reminder that the person I missed is no longer there. Grief and love are two sides of the same coin. You cannot love something without eventually grieving it. That love has changed both you and itself, no matter how hard you kick and scream and oppose it.
Love is little red birds and refractions of light. Love is fleeing an auditorium because a certain song starts playing. Love is hiding tears at your desk because you remembered them. Love is grief.
Love is transforming.
