What Was Lost Forever Is Found Today
The morning she died, my whole family showed up and waited for the funeral home to arrive and remove her corpse from the house. I was one of the first people there and I watched as my family walked in through the kitchen, right into the small dining room where her death bed was on display. They all gasped at the sight and wept uncontrollably. I must have watched ten people repeat that exact process and I found myself so incredibly thankful that I didn’t have the guts to go and do the same thing.
I didn’t want to see her like that. Didn’t want my last image to be that of a lifeless corpse in a permanent stillness, a body devoid of the kindest, most thoughtful soul I’d ever known. Instead, I sat at her kitchen table and I waited. I waited and I waited and I waited.
I just wanted to get the damn thing over with. After a while, I walked outside and watched two large men roll the body outside under a white tarp. They struggled to get down the stairs, but did it with such care and affection that I was thankful for their effort. And then I thought about how ridiculous the notion was to begin with. I could hear my grandma laughing.
“I’m not in there anymore, you fools!” She says.
“Why you being so careful?”
My family immediately starting tearing the house apart looking for sentimental items that they could take with them. I found it incredibly offensive and viewed them the same way one does when they see a hungry rat in a garbage can. Could you wait ten god damn minutes before you start tearing the whole house apart? I thought to myself in disbelief. The audacity.
She had nine or ten months to prepare for that last morning and she made it very clear about how she wanted her final wishes to be carried out.
- Don’t spend too much on a casket (she would prefer the cheapest option possible).
- Don’t overdo it on a headstone (she was fine with the free military-issued one).
- She wanted her rings and other assorted jewelry to go to my sister.
- She wanted the house to stay in the family.
- She wanted the photo albums to go to me.
“They’re yours, hun.” She’d say in between stuttered breaths, cancer ravaging an otherwise reliably strong body. I’m sure she told the rest of my family the same exact thing because she was never one to stay quiet about anything at all, let alone her life’s final wishes.
They all knew. They had to know.
That afternoon, after my family had pilfered the house for all it was worth, I went back in to retrieve the albums. I’d figured enough time had passed and, I mean honestly, they were incredibly important to me. Those photo albums were responsible for igniting that photographic fire within me and I felt a deep connection to them even beyond their actual existence. They represented the only true love I had ever known.
I was shocked beyond description when I walked in and couldn’t find them. Anywhere.
“Really? You fucking people took the only thing that was due to me?” I thought to myself and stormed out in silence. I audibly wept for the first time once I got around the block and knew that nobody could see me. Up until that exact moment, I’d held it together pretty well and was proud of myself for that. I didn’t cry when she was diagnosed, I didn’t cry when I watched her wither away to such a sad state, and I didn’t cry the morning of when my father called and said she was gone. But standing there in the light July rain like that, knowing that I would never see my grandmother or those photos again for as long as I lived — well, that was enough to break me.
I cried like a hungry baby.
I can’t explain how it happened exactly, or why they had even disappeared that morning to begin with, but I actually found those photo albums hidden in her breezeway earlier this week. Seven years later.
Part of me wonders if that brilliant woman put them there intentionally. She knew the lot of us inside and out, after all, and she knew that most of us were going to start taking sentimental things the very moment we could (regardless of how inappropriate the timing was). I’d like to believe that she put them in there for me to find at a later date. I’d like to think it was a defense mechanism and the final way that she ever looked out for me. She wanted them to go to me and that’s the only way she knew that they would.
I strongly doubt she thought it’d take me so long, though.
Something in my gut tells me that there is a grain of truth to that theory even though I will never have concrete evidence to support it. I simply cannot think of any other reason why they would be there like that, hidden from view behind a large series of old encyclopedias. Who else would have put them there? Who else would have hidden them? And why?
I was overcome with a joy I had never felt before in my life. To instantly let go of a huge familial grudge like that, to hold those photos in my hands, to open up the pages and smell that old familiar scent of dried glue and plastic. It was easily the happiest moment I’d had in at least seven years. There they were…and they were finally where they should have been that entire time. They were mine.
I took them home and immediately started to inch my way through them. I was taken aback at how emotional this was for me, and I found myself so incredibly quiet there, alone in the kitchen of my home. There was grandma, alive and well there, just like she’d never left. For a moment, it was almost as if we were having a conversation with one another. I started to recall the stories, the memories of us looking through them three to five times every week for nearly twenty years, and I could hear my grandma’s bellowing laughter in an electric pulse coming from the pages as I gently turned them.
“You see me there?” She says.
“Why you being so careful?”
This was the closest to peace that I will likely ever reach. I closed my eyes and fully embraced the emotion.
The old neighborhood used to be alive with the sound of kids playing, of cars driving by, and of mean dogs tied up with rusty chain link. None of that exists today. All the kids have grown up, the parents grown old, and those mean dogs long dead. I must have spent six hours walking around the block looking for different places that I could recreate and I found the silence discomforting.
This tripped me up pretty hard.
Sometimes, I’ll wake up and realize that I’m almost thirty years old. I haven’t seen my grandma in almost a decade. There is hardly a single shred of life today that ties me back to the lives in which I lived before this one. I overwhelm myself to the point that it feels like I have no personal cognizance or frame of reference that’s even partially relevant to the life I have to live now. My childhood friends keep getting married or dying. My own family grows older and drifts away slowly. Some of us haven’t talked in almost a decade now. Even this town looks and feels different than the way I remember it. The buildings are different colors, some are completely gone, and the air tastes less sweet than the fruit I fondly recollect upon in written pieces not much unlike this one.
It’s been so long now that I have a hard time remembering myself (or who I thought I was) at all. And it’s scary as hell to feel like you aren’t entirely sure of what makes you you.
So there I was, walking around the block and wondering to myself. What makes me tick? What gets me up in the morning and motivates me to trudge through to another day? What gives me hope, what makes me smile, where are my priorities and what exactly are my intentions?
Through this, I can only really say that I’ve learned a few things.
- Cherish the people that you have. There will come a day where you wake up and the entire world will be different. It will shift with or without you and it will keep spinning infinitely onward. If you love somebody, tell them. If you feel positively about somebody, express it. Don’t let any stone go unturned.
- Leave the past in the past, but don’t forget it. It’s a miracle that we exist here in this moment together at all. The entire history of the universe, from the big-bang and ancient rocks being pulled together by gravity, to the dinosaurs, to the conquering of worlds and the cackling of babies all led to this moment. It led to you. It led to me. The past defines who you are right now, but that doesn’t mean you are relegated to be a certain way. Accept your past and move beyond it. The grass is always greener over there.
- Don’t let petty grudges consume you (even if they aren’t petty). There’s been a big part of me so damn angry with my family for the better part of a decade. I didn’t know who took those pictures, so I was mad at all of them collectively. It ruined a lot, wasted a whole lot of time, and it was eventually proven to be nothing at all. That’s on me, it’s my cross to bear, and I will walk the line accordingly. But I won’t make the same mistake twice.
Life is made up of these little, seemingly inconsequential moments. And the real messed up part of that is this: those moments end up being so much more paramount than any of the big ones.
So pay attention. Look for a laugh that you like, express that you like it. Look for smiling faces and good music and good vibes and forget all the rest. That’s what it means to be alive.
And let me tell me, coming from a state of perpetual numbness, it feels pretty damn good to just be.
That’s all you are when it comes right down to it. And that’s what I realized when I was walking around the familiar neighborhood with different colored houses and bigger trees than I ever remembered.
Yesterday is important and you must cherish it. Stop running.
And so I did. I’ve been feeling like myself ever since.
