Normal, Everyday Miracles

My essay about grief

In September, I sat in the passenger seat of a car somewhere above the Bronx and screamed. I closed my eyes and dug my fingernails into my thighs and made the loudest sound I knew how to make. No words, just noise. My skin felt too hot and too tight and so I screamed louder. The screams tore through me until I was bodiless, until I was nothing but piercing sound.

This is what I thought grief would feel like all the time, like screaming on the highway. I spent months in anticipation of this kind of grief, my mama’s slow and steady illness inching me towards a life on the other side of her death, a life I imagined would be filled by the sound of my own screams.

But I only screamed that once. On a highway above the Bronx, with Loren in the driver’s seat, his eyes steady and steadfast on the road. I screamed for maybe a minute, and every other minute since my mama died I’ve somehow spent not screaming.

**

I’ve fallen in love with my morning commute. It’s a new romance, young love, the kind where she can do no wrong and her quirks are still charming. I love how when it rains the subway stations fill with water and the floors get slick. I love the conductor’s voice, illegible and staticky, announcing we’ll be moving shortly. I love squeezing too tightly between two strangers, misjudging the space, apologizing, standing back up.

Perhaps a better way to describe this affair is to say that I’ve fallen in love with normalcy. I have an apartment, I have a job, I ride the subway between them. It’s there on the subway, anonymous and in transit, that it hits me how miraculous this all is. The normal, everyday miracle of not screaming.

**

I want so badly to write you an essay about grief. Or at least I want to want to write you an essay about grief. I want to want to tell you what this feels like.

I’m in Virginia, at an artist residency tucked into the Shenandoah Mountains. There’s snow on the ground and the sky is purple. Each day, I sit at a long wooden table in a room lined with windows and books and I try to write about grief.

Yesterday, I tried for so long that the day became night and the sky went from purple to black. Two of the other residents, both women, both poets, sat on a couch nearby and watched a UFC fight. They drank Virginia white wine straight from the bottle and cheered when a fighter fell over.

I want so badly to write you an essay about grief and also to write you an essay about literally anything else. I want to write you an essay about two poets passing a bottle of wine back and forth, watching men soaked in sweat pummel each other, over and over. This would be an essay about how humans are weird and how that is the normal, everyday miracle of life.

**

In October, I went viral on TikTok. An artist with 33.7 million followers and a blue check mark painted my face and asked me questions about my dead mom. The video was for series on “interesting New Yorkers.” In it, I smile and tell him that I want to write a book one day and that my mama died by swallowing a series of life ending medications and that I was there while she did it, holding her hand. After we filmed the video, I smiled some more, thanked the artist, and then took the subway home.

At home, I cried for so long that my head got clogged and I wanted to yank out my teeth just to give myself some room to breathe. I wanted to scream then too, but I didn’t.

I don’t want to be an “interesting New Yorker.” My grief is not “interesting.” It’s long and constant and boring in how mind numbingly sad it all is. Trust me, you don’t want to read that essay.

The TikTok in which I smile while I talk about my dead mom has 1.3 million views. I’ve never watched it.

**

Mama, I have two videos of you from the day before you died. They’re of all of us really, sitting on the couches and the floor of the living room at home. You’re wearing a blue and white plaid button down and you look like you.

In the first video, Loren plays an acoustic rendition of “Because the Night,” on his guitar and I have the camera on 2x zoom, aimed right at you. You’re grinning, big teeth on full display, dancing with your arms from your spot on the couch. Half way through the video you start to sing along.

“I’m dying,” the second video starts. You’re making a joke, egging your brother on, trying to convince him to tell us something. “I’ll tell you all on Saturday!” he jokes back. The whole room laughs. You won’t live until Saturday. You’re taking the life ending medications on Friday.

In the last photo I took of you before you died, your head is in my lap. It’s taken from above, your ear is against my thigh and your eyes are closed. You look peaceful.

None of this is normal. Watching it now, I find it all so beautiful that I want to cry.

**

So much of life is new.

Loren and I move in together. We buy red linen sheets for our bed and order Egon Schiele prints on Etsy. We debate the correct size for our living room carpet. We are gifted a green Le Creuset pan. On Sunday mornings, I slice sweet onions and cherry tomatoes and sauté them in oil. I make soft scrambled eggs and spoon feta into a ceramic bowl that I threw myself. Our silverware is a family heirloom and I spend several hours polishing it until it shines.

I start a job at the New York Times. My face feels warm with pride each time I announce this fact. I write Excel formulas and make slides. Each morning, I take an elevator to a cafe where the barista learns my order. “The usual?” She asks me. I smile and nod.

When I go home to Maplewood, all this newness starts to feel like a facade. I walk into the office on the second floor of my childhood home to take a towel from the linen closet. This is the room my mama died in. I see her swallow the life ending medication. I see her take her last breath. I see her stillness, and then I see myself pull a pair of pink socks onto her feet, which were turning white and cold.

My mommy tells me she’d like to sell the house in Maplewood. I can see that she is braced, expecting me to argue or cry. I do neither. “Sell it,” I tell her. I want her to have the chance to fall in love with normalcy too.

**

I used to think that an essay about grief would be an essay about screaming. But really, it’s just an essay about life. Maybe that’s why it’s been so hard for me to write this thing, because to parse grief from living is an impossibility.

This is my essay about grief then, which is really just an essay about living. It’s an essay about the subway, and poets drinking wine, about watching and not watching old videos, about decorating an apartment, starting a new job, saying goodbye.

I wish I could tie this all up in a bow for you. I wish I could tell you that I can’t stop screaming or that I spend all day feeling lucky to be alive. I wish I could tell you that I’m ok or that I’m not ok at all.

But I can’t. Because I’m all of the above. That’s probably true for everyone. That’s probably the most normal thing of all.

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A Note: Thank you for your patience while I’ve worked to figure out what I want to want to say about grief ❤️