by Bryn Grey
What is the tangible weight of grief? Where do we hold space for our grieving?
The AC is out when I arrive. The windows are all open but it’s newer construction, built for curb appeal, and there’s no real means for a cross breeze. The house is already heavy – we have gathered because another’s son has died. I’m sleeping in C.’s room. The air is oppressive, but I drape myself in one of his chef coats, hanging pressed in his closet which I crawl to the back of, to cry and flip through cookbooks, hotboxed in with memories and still, stale air.
He’s undeniably here: I smell him, feel the dense air thicken as his spirit stirs. At night I lay motionless, frosted with tacky dried sweat, as silent tears run in a constant stream, pool itchy in my ears. From beside the bed I hear a low, persistent sob. I listen all night and as dawn breaks I whisper: “Sweetheart, it’s not supposed to hurt anymore.” Soon he’s gone from the floor where he never really was.
“I must be going crazy,” his father challenges me, eyes wide and feral. “Every time I’m falling asleep or watching TV, I hear C. say: ‘I’m sorry.’”
“Do you tell him it’s ok, or do you tell him that you’re sorry too?”
Dave won’t answer. I see his pupils flinch but his face doesn’t move. He turns away, doesn’t speak of it again.
In the music room the Steinway is cloistered. I long to lift its lid, stroke the keys, but because I can’t play well I don’t dare. Instead I pull out the cardboard box containing C.’s ashes, still in the box they were shipped in from the morgue. Thick white cardboard, a piece of printer paper taped to one side, identifying its occupant. The tape has failed: one corner of the label flaps, dog- eared. This makes me inexplicably sad.
Inside he is ensconced in heavy, clear plastic; I think of the belts he would fashion out of cling wrap, smile. I feel the weight of him, of the box that constrains him, whose paper corners dig into my thighs. Rake my fingers across his ashes like a desktop Zen rock garden from a novelty store. The only other remains I’ve ever seen were my father’s, the edited-for-TV version, sieved and sifted into fine grey ash, resting in a hand rubbed pine Shaker box on my mother’s credenza. All of C. is here: shards of bone, nubs of his impeccable teeth (dad’s a dentist). They mingle in the grainy silt that was once his face and hands and hair. I turn my head to divert my tears so as not to sully his ashes, clump them like cat litter. Sweat rolls down my back and I feel wholly liquid as I hold the box of parched dust that was my lover closer, grasp it tight until my sweat softens the cardboard. Another corner of the label gives way as the box bends, ever so slightly, into my embrace.
What is the tangible weight of grief? Where do we hold space for our grieving? How do bodies respond: why are different senses triggered for different people, as we reconcile the same loss? Why do we constrain grieving with notions of what is proper; why does self-awareness factor into our most private moments of sorrow, when no one except our ghosts are watching? How do we learn to lean in to grief and let go, as we continue to hold fast and stay tethered to ourselves?
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A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Bryn Grey is a graduate of the Boston University College of Fine Arts with a degree in music performance, and the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program, with a concentration in nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Speculative Nonfiction. After extended stints in Chicago and New York (and shorter but no less impactful ones in New Haven and Paris), she presently finds herself living and writing in New Orleans, in the company of a very hefty rescued pit bull named Phelps.