I’m visiting my mom in Manteca for a few days and staying in my grandmother’s old room. Seeing a photograph my mom found of Grandma punctured the grief I’ve kept stifled in an airtight package since February. Seeing her purse, full and unopened, her handwriting, feeling the weight of her special foam pillow: these are the things that make grief seep out and fill the room, following me silently until I sit down with it. So last night I thumbed through my journal entries from the days leading up to and following my grandmother’s death. And I realized that I’ve already begun to forget all that I hoped to gain from loss, the ways in which I thought that my perspective, my relationships, and ultimately my life would be changed. So I’ve decided to revive this long forgotten blog and periodically submit excerpts from my journal entries in the hopes that it will help me remember what I’ve learned, and maybe learn more, and perhaps even help whoever might read this to do the same. I’ll begin with some entries from when I was staying with and caring for my grandma in her home in Rancho Cordova before she sold her house and moved in with my mom last June...

November 8th 2005

I held my grandfather for the first time today. It was always the other way around because he was big and I was small. Now his remains are in a cardboard box in my grandma’s closet, right next to the Christmas cards and above a package of Depends. Grandma still has them—the Depends—from when she was so sick and in the hospital two years ago. It’s amazing how she rallied. Does her still having those diapers suggest that she recognizes that she could need them again or is it just another example of hoarding inspired by the Great Depression? At any rate, I was cleaning out her closet when the box caught my eye. I don’t know why; it’s just an ordinary cardboard box. I guess it was the envelope on top that grabbed my attention; it’s thick and I thought maybe it contained instructions for what was inside the box, which I guess it does in a way… but a box full of ashes was not what I’d expected. I thought it would be more keepsakes, like earlier today when Grandma had me take another box out of her closet and choose a teacup and saucer. That box said: “For each grandchild to choose one” but this one said: “In this container are the remains of John R. Bither.” There were more words after that but they blurred with the realization of what I was holding. As I felt the box’s weight sink into my hands, I had the urge to open it up, push my hand into his ashes, scoop up a handful and let them trickle back down. I remembered what Anne Lamott wrote about how ashes are mischievous, sticking to your fingers, blowing in every direction but the one you want them to go in. I pictured myself opening up that box and making a royal mess in Grandma’s closet: ashes falling all over. Maybe I’d sneeze. Or cough. Or simply let that heavy box slide from grasp. Those thoughts terrified me, but at the same time part of me wanted to set my grandfather’s ashes free, not to scatter them, though that’s the verb people always seem to use, but to snow them, to toss them up in the air and let them spiral to the ground. I wanted that box to be empty and somewhere other than next to the Christmas cards and above the Depends. I wanted the ashes to snow so much that it would be like that picture of Grandma and Papop in our driveway in Chugiak in their parkas, except everything would be grey and silver and white like Papop’s hair and we would remember. We would remember and our remembering would set us free.