What we leave behind when we go

[Trigger warning: grief, loss, death]

I just finished reading the wonderful book “My grandmother asked me to tell you she’s sorry” by Fredrick Backman — quite serendipitous, since it’s a lovely, delicate book on loss, grief, and the power of stories & community (family, friends, etc.) to heal. (As well as the power of embracing differences.) 

If there’s one thing I fear more than loss that’s getting bitter from grief and pain. I don’t want to get bitter. So as I process and prepare for the losses that will eventually come, I’ll take with me this passage from one of the very last chapters of the book “My grandmother asked me to tell you she’s sorry”: 

“

You never say good-bye in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. You just say “See you later”. It’s important to people in the Land-of-Almost-Awake that it should be this way, because they believe that nothing really ever completely dies. It just turns into a story, undergoes a little shift in grammar, changes tense from “now” to “then”. 

A funeral can go on for weeks, because few events in life are a better opportunity to tell stories. Admittedly on the first day it’s mainly stories about sorrow and loss, but gradually as the days and nights pass, they transform into the sorts of stories that you can’t tell without bursting out laughing. Stories about how the deceased once read the instructions “Apply to the face but not around the eyes” on the packaging of some skin cream, and then called the manufacturer with extreme annoyance to point out that this is precisely where the face is positioned. Or how she employed a dragon to caramelize the tops of all the creme brûlées before a big party in the castle, but forgot to check whether the dragon had a cold. […] 

And the Miamasians laugh so loudly that the stories rise up like lanterns around the grave. Until all stories are one and the tenses are one and the same. They laugh until no one can forget that this is what we leave behind when we go: the laughs. 

“

May this apply to me, my dad, and all the other losses I am feeling so painfully now.