Grief Reveals: The Love I Needed Most.
When my mom dropped me off to my grandmother’s that day, I was mad, I was angry, but I was mostly afraid. I wanted things to be different. I desperately wanted to be with her, for us all to be together. And—it was that wanting, it was that craving for a reality that no longer existed, that would (unknowingly) bring me the greatest pain.
So, slowly, and resentfully, I began to call this place home. Slowly, I transitioned to waking myself up in the morning—no longer benefiting from the footsteps of my mother in the morning or the irritated repeatings of “get up y’all,” as she desperately wanted to get back in her bed to sleep. I no longer had the luxury of saying “I’m not hungry” to her breakfast offerings in the morning before school, as I never had an appetite that early, too nervous to eat. I would no longer be able to look back at the front door, watching her closing it and heading back to sleep as she saw us on the bus to school.
—Instead.
Instead, I would learn to wake myself up. I would learn to remind myself, “you gotta get up or you’re gonna miss the bus.” Instead of walking into a kitchen greeted by the residue of a home cooked breakfast, I’d be met with a runway of emptiness. A pathway to the back door and out to the bus stop, as my grandma had already went off to work and my grandfather was deep in sleep, tired from his night shift at Tyson Foods. As I reached the end of Helen’s Lane, I would stand under the sole white oak tree—a tree I would in time learn to hate. A tree that both protected me during the rain and attempted to hide me from passbyers—reminding me once more that I was alone and confused.
My mom would, in time, break her promise. She would never return, but my grandmother would always be there. There, but blinded by the resentment of the life I wanted. There, but trapped behind the pain and grief I would one day realize was there. There, but not fully in plain sight.
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Grief Reveals,
It’s only been after the passing of my grandmother that I’ve come to recognize that I wasn’t left alone…I was left to love. This wasn’t just any kind of love, her love was the most potent of all: pure, wild, accepting, and free.
It’s only in retrospect that I see that my grandmother and her home represented the love that my soul needed. It wasn’t the kind of love that a 7th grader would ever be able to comprehend, it was a kind of love that I would, in due time, grow to appropriately appreciate and accept. I see, now, that I had to be ready for it. I had to be 28, I had to reach a point where my higher self could fully receive its offerings. Her love proved strongest through time.
My grandmother’s love was the playground that I needed to learn that I was and still am wild and free—free to choose my future, free to direct my path with my own might, strength and ability. Grief has revealed the depths of my grandmother’s love for me. My grandmother’s love turned out to be the kind of love I needed most.
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