1. Reflect
This time last year my Aunt had still been alive. Sick, but alive. My sisters and brothers still had their mother, and I still held onto some sense of redemption, some hope that I would soon be able to make up for lost time. For missed calls and ignored calls. For the radio-silence smoking from the other side of the border. My siblings’ mother was dying. A woman I had known all my life. She had been a second mother to me during so many points in my childhood and I couldn’t call.
But I would, I told myself. Call soon. We’d laugh over the years now long passed and the summers once spent bathing in the splendor of childhood. It would be as it had always been and once again all would be forgiven. The missed calls, the ignored calls, the miles in between, and for cancer looming. All forgiven.
And then she died. And all those fantasies of remission passed too. What was left was an immaculate sense of guilt. A crime of untouched time spoiled by the misplacement of my own sense of assumed tomorrows. What was left now was my three siblings without their mother, my sister and I without our Aunt.
My Aunt’s passing wasn’t unexpected. It wasn’t the type that throws your body into shock. Her death built up like CO2 in my lungs; thick and blurred as fog exhaled. It was suffocating and cruel. Her death was a finale. As if I had been sitting in the theater of her life, watching as she remade the world again and again through her conviction. Those last few years of her felt unreal.
I knew that my Aunt was sick for about two years before she passed away on March 14th, 2018. I found out through text. It was maybe 6 am on a Thursday, I was already awake getting ready for school. And nothing felt different. There were no signs. In my own sense of the world and time, she was here and then suddenly she wasn’t.
And then I looked at my phone and saw a text from my Dad saying that my Aunt had passed away the night before. I read the message maybe only twice before putting my phone down and continuing to get ready. I couldn’t deal with this right now. That must have been what I was thinking. I vaguely remember going to my sister’s room to tell her the news. It was all very monotonous, it was as if my body was not allowing me to understand what happened. I told my sister I’d be going to school anyways, I had things to do.
For me, she hadn’t died the night of March 14th but instead the morning after. She wasn’t gone until I read the words and even after that, I don’t think I could let her disappear until there was time to deal with it all. Life is never as busy as it is on the day you’re meant to grieve.
2. Give Yourself Time
The first time I had really thought about my Aunt possibly dying was at an after-school club meeting with my high school’s LGBTQIA+ club. We were all going around in a circle talking about our weeks, how we were feeling, etc. I hadn’t thought much about my Aunt since discovering she had cancer. It was easier that way. I knew cancer through my sister’s best friend’s mother, and her mother. Cancer was a friend of a friend, we weren’t close and I imagined we never would be. It wasn’t until after my Aunt’s death that I would discover that all of her sisters and her mother had suffered through cancer as well. They all survived and my Aunt did not.
Seven years had passed since I left Canada and my sister and I visited back home maybe two or three times that I could remember, none of those trips taking place within the last three or four years. There’s a lot of things I’m not sure about in relation to my Aunt anymore and the world built around her which I was once a part of.
It all feels like a life I imagined. One I could wash away.
Things I do remember: the last time I hugged my Aunt.
It was summertime. She was wearing these tight, white, shorts and a burnt orange tank top. Her hair was soft honey brown and her skin appeared to me like sun-glazed copper. She felt supernatural and when she asked when my sister and I would be coming home, I said soon. That was another lie.
I try to not think about what cancer took from us — from her. And when I do, I get angry. There’s nothing like a disease to remind you of all the things you haven’t done, the time for which you can’t make up.
And time becomes more real even as the memories fade, maybe that wasn’t the last time I hugged her. But it’s what I remember.
Death has made me a good liar. It helps with the pain, little white lies subduing rage.
3. Let your friends hold you
I don’t think I told anyone about my Aunt except for the people at that club meeting. I remember crying so much that day I thought I might die. Ironically at one point, I think I kind of hoped I would. There was so much guilt, there is still so much guilt. It’s just that there’s nothing beautiful about goodbyes. There’s nothing sufferable about unnatural death. A death that hits you like a plow truck no matter how much time you had to prepare for it. In fact, I’m convinced the knowing made it worse. That day I spent crying in a club meeting in front of what felt like a mass of strangers about a woman they would never know, and at times it felt like I never knew. I’ve never felt so unsafe.
Sometimes tears aren’t therapeutic, sometimes they’re violent. Sometimes grieving is dangerous.
What I wish for most is that I would have let my friends hold me. Losing someone you care about is hard enough, but dealing with loss on your own is torture. I thought that I could work through the death of my Aunt on my own. But loneliness does not equate to strength. I think it’s easy to doubt the power and impact of friendship but it’s what carries me through this life. My friends dug the tunnel out, they found light and brought a piece of it down to me. For so long I refused their love, their warmth. But I’ve found reconciliation through my love with them. It’s a funny thing how life and death work together like that, to string the pieces of our lives back together as we continue to unstitch.
4. Scream
Let yourself scream. I didn’t do that enough. Scream out loud or in your head. Scream into pillows or out of a car window. Scream on the freeway, as the subway rushes in, in the shower, in your bed or someone else’s. Scream whenever you want, as loud as you want and for as long as you want until it feels like things will be okay again. And when it starts to get bad, scream some more.
5. Let the past resurface, don’t erase it
I tried to have a lot of new beginnings after my Aunt died. I think I wanted to be someone else. A young woman who had never known life before The States. I wanted to be born at 17 in New York, with my dreams collected and suffering unclaimed.
Childhood was no longer, it only made me miss her more. And I didn’t deserve that. I don’t get to miss her. She was here for so long and I did nothing for so long. So, I punished myself by forgetting myself. I burned the past a thousand times, but everything seemed to be made out of the fire. I cursed the life I once knew and blurred the lines between myth and reality. I think that’s why I can’t remember so much of what happened around the time of my Aunt’s death. I can’t remember what I made up, what memories of her exist only in my imagination and which ones I share with the world. Maybe it’s selfish, but if I could go back I would never let go. I would build fires for light instead of destruction. I would let my mind travel backward into worlds that seem like fiction to me now. I would hold those moments for as long as I could until they felt ready to leave on their own. I would let the past keep its presence in my life, keep her in my life. Sometimes we have to turn around and run back to who we were before to find out where to go next.
6. Spread your ashes
You’re grieving doesn’t end with the spreading of ashes. But they must go. A lot of things burn when people die and we collect the leftovers hoping it contains some piece of that person within the rubble. I’ll tell you now that there’s nothing there. Tangibility can make us think things are more real, more certain than they ought to be. You can touch those ashes and feel nothing or you can feel everything. But, its the feeling, the emotions that you should hold on to. It took time for me to learn that all that weight doesn’t make me more of a person. I’ve lived enough without needing visible scars to prove it. Let it go.
7. Allow yourself to be happy
These past few weeks I’ve been feeling really good. I’d like to think it’s my Aunt. I feel more connected to her now than ever even though I knew her most tangibly as a kid.
I remember Canadian-spent summers in Ajax at her house with my brother and sisters. I remember spider-crawling up her camel-colored carpeted stairs past portraits of cheetahs and statues of King Tut. I remember the way the sun felt, and how young my brother had been.
Just a baby, it felt like. I think about how young he is still, and now without his mother, I again think about all the things I didn’t do to take care of him and my sisters, to be there as they were losing one of the most important people in their lives.
I’ve tried to punish myself for the way I grieve. But I can’t anymore. I cried once and it was enough to bury all the lost phone calls, missed birthdays, forgotten birthdays, graduations, diagnoses, pap scans, and first kisses. It was enough to settle the past. I’m here now and I forgive myself every time I see their faces.