grief in eight acts.

1

I tell my best friend that if he died, I’d call his phone and sit quiet for seconds in the waiting room of the phone lines that will take me nowhere, just so I could hear his voice on the other line. My great-grandma leaves behind recorded radio hours, and I seek them out to make up for the six year radio silence. Sometimes, if I close my eyes, the skip of the Elton John record sounds like your laughter, like you listened to it so much the grooves in the vinyl became valleys for your voice.

2

I think about my own death as much as I think about sports or cleaning the inside of my oven, which is another way to say: not at all. I think about everyone else’s death as much as I think about the right corner of his mouth and the bridges of Taylor Swift songs, which is to say: all the time. It is the most selfish thing about me, that I want to die before everyone I love, so I never have to get on a first-name basis with the absence, which is another way to say: my body has never been furnished with a good bone.

3

Losing someone is always poor timing; losing someone in a year baptized by the fountain of loss and grief means I’ve probably said something deeply offensive about the universe’s mother, and this, this right here is the payback.

4

The armchair doesn’t look the same after you die. I’ve only come home a few times since the last chapter of April, but I feel the emptiness of the chair all the same, like I live inside of it, like its leather longing tattooed itself underneath my eyelids.

5

The woman in the second pew of my church lost her son, and I noticed how her hair went from red to white lightning-quick. I noticed how her face aged another fifty years every Sunday. I think about how my grandma gets smaller every day since you died. I think about how grief is a world-renowned sculptor.

6

The tattoo of a ship on your right arm is my name twin, and Mom says you told her to make sure I knew its name was the same as mine, when she saw you for the last time. It is one thing to know you have been loved so deeply; and it is another thing entirely to be made so deeply aware of it.

7

When the headlines of this year do not cut deep enough, when the statistics don’t seem real, I press play on a supercut of my own grief to breathe life into the black ink carving out the number of deaths; I take the 948,000 and paint them as 948,000 empty chairs, 948,000 armchairs turned into fossils, 948,000 living rooms that have become still-life paintings, paintings that a family flickers and floats through, nothing but brushstrokes. Somehow there is still life.

8

A few days after you die, my professor launches into a lecture about palliative care, and death, and specifically how the death of a grandparent affects a family, and all I do is laugh, because you would, and because everything about this year has felt like a punchline. But here is the answer, to how the death of a grandparent affects a family: the armchair is always empty, even (especially) when someone is sitting in it.