Grief doesn’t always take

My uncle handed me a black notebook that could fit in my hands. His eyes were bloodshot and his face was red and swollen from crying. From alcohol. From everything. He started and restarted like the words hadn’t loaded correctly. Like his throat was too dry. Like he didn’t really want to say it.

“She would’ve wanted ... She left this behind. For you. It was kinda the only thing she asked me to do.” He held out a black, leather bound notebook to me. His skin was as rough as his communication. And just as salted.

I had taken the notebook. It was a Moleskin. Something really nice, of course. I can feel the leather in my fingers.

“Wow. it’s really nice,” I said, as if that means anything to a grieving human being.

“Yeah,” he said distantly. “She always had really good taste.”

I had looked at the book with curiosity. My aunt must have done this before she started losing her memory. She couldn’t even write at the end. And I smiled at my uncle because I couldn’t hug him. I hadn’t given my uncle a smile since I had to hug him when my aunt was dying on her their bed.

My uncle is a rough man. He’s a man who doesn’t speak kindly to others or about others or about himself. I want to say he treated my aunt well before she died but the truth is different than that. I was amazed in that moment that he gave me the notebook—that there was any tenderness left in him after her death to oblige one of her wishes.

He loved her more than I thought.

“Do you mind if I open it and read it later?” I ask, my wrist limp and waving the notebook in my hand as if it was heavy. As if it was 20,000 pounds of paper grief wrapped in black leather.

“No. Go ahead.” He replied in an automatic way before his brow clenched in pain like he realized it. He looked at me in the eye for the first time in months. “You know she really loved you.”

And I swallowed the knotted lump that climbed from my stomach to my throat. “Yeah. I really loved her too,” I replied, feeling vulnerable, like I was showing him my throat.

There wasn’t much for me to do in the ways of this grief—my beloved Aunt, the only relative I was really close to, passing away. Because of the pandemic restrictions and the emotional distance between me and my family members ... I didn’t even get to see her buried. I didn’t get to watch her slip away into the dark before her eyes could shut.

It just ... happened.

While I was somewhere else; living and doing other things. And “being” something else. Someone strange to her. I don’t know if my aunt would have recognized me now. Because now, I’m sitting in my car. I’m holding the notebook. And I’m tucking my finger under the rope that held it closed.

My aunt must have arranged this gift for me years before dementia took her away from us. Years, years before she turned into a toddling skeleton with a mind that couldn’t be called hers. How she had beat herself up for it in the end. She had seemed afraid before her death. Afraid to stop clinging. But those are my guesses at a wordless expression on a dying woman I loved. But before that ... she was happy. Maybe she hadn’t had a choice ... maybe none of us would have a choice in how we are in the end and all we can do is hope that the people who care for us are gentle.

I’m crying in my car, unable to stop my tears as they fall on the first page inside. A note. In her writing. It reads:

I love you

And I know what you will do with your incredible gifts.

Never change for anyone.

Never let anyone tell you who you are.

Never compromise on the things that mean the most to you.

Protect yourself.

Be free.

And shatter that imagined ceiling that holds you back from your dreams.

I love you.

Your Aunt,

Gay

I’m trembling. I wish she had given me this before dementia had her mind, her personality, and her words. Before all the things that encompassed her were taken by her own failing memory ... one that couldn’t seem to hold onto anything but repeated conversations with my mother. I’m sobbing for every chance I didn’t get to touch her, and feel her pain in the way that someone who is actually there can feel it. I’m sobbing because I didn’t get to have that. And I didn’t get to send her off in the way that she wanted me to.

And I’m sobbing because I realize I didn’t know what that way truly was. She was ash in the ocean now.

When I finally caught my breath I noticed there was something in the front inside pocket. My lips parted as I started to carefully pull it from the folds of paper.

It was a check.

For $20,000.