phone to the afterlife

A death in San Francisco. A death in San Francisco. The strange thing about death is sometimes the tragedy of it, the impact of it depends who it is and how it happened. It’s like the details, the pauses, the moments surrounding the end matter, somehow. I didn’t understand death, the reason it is so hard to stomach until someone I was close to died. I realized then the finality of it all was the hardest part. It might be the only final, end, true end in our world. Nothing is forever but forever can change. Relationships can dissolve but then become one. Jobs can be lost and gain. Divorces can be remarriages to the same person you divorced in the first place. You can change your mind. He can change your mind. But death. There is no going back on death. And maybe the inability to go back, to have it on your own terms makes it so hard.

When my grandfather died, he almost died in San Francisco but he died in Santa Rosa. They transferred him because it was time to go home. He said to me the last time I spoke to him over the phone, “I’m leaving tomorrow.” And he did leave. He left early that next morning. What surprised me most when I felt the first pang of the death, the end, was that not everyone could feel what was happening inside of me. That I was just expected to move on and get over it because he was old or it was his time. But all I wanted to hear was I was sorry. Sorry for your loss. Not a get over montage of the typical move on, move on –why so I can make you feel better?

So the fact that I am mourning, mourning a man, a man who picked me up when I was sick at school, would take my dinner orders while he sang around his home, my 2^nd home. A man who called his wife my grandmother his bride. A man who would yell mail call and I would run to see what was in the mail even though it never was for me. A man who in the early am when I was a child he would pretend to be some type of funny monster as I cuddled into the womb of my grandmother in their bed. He would put his shirt over his head and until I pushed his stomach, he would make strange and funny noises. A man who drove me to college my first day. A man who wrote his last check to me. The death, the death didn’t matter but the end of a life. A life that had impacted me had. So when people are touched by the stories of losing another. It might be, might be because they remember how it is to lose someone they love, they love forever. If only I had a phone to the afterlife, I’d be fine. To hear his booming voice in my ear again, just once, just once, just once.