Thank you, Grandpa.
A long-delayed Goodbye from a very slow griever.
When I first heard about Mary Poppins Returns I was over the moon. Not only am I a big musicals fan, the first Mary Poppins movie was an integral part of my childhood.
I grew up watching movies my Grandpa would record from the TV, in an effort to keep me and my younger brother entertained.
There are five movies in particular we surely watched a dozen times: Willow, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, The Money Pit, The Million Dollar Duck and — of course — Mary Poppins.
Despite the happy childhood memories, I didn’t exactly rush to see Mary Poppins Returns when it first came out. In fact, I actively avoided it.
There was darkness lurking but I chose to ignore it.
My Grandpa was a practical man, who made objective choices and set rational goals — except in what it came to his grandchildren.
He always encouraged us to dream big. He always made us feel safe. He always ensured we had the best of whatever we were in need of at the time.
He taught me how to read and write and was invested in my creative endeavors since the very first spark of creativity and imagination.
My Grandpa was not perfect, though. He wasn’t great at acknowledging his shortcomings or admitting weakness (guess the apple does not fall far from the tree). He was sometimes too blunt. More often than not, he was harsh. Conveying emotion did not come easily for him so his love was more present in acts of kindness than in kind words.
We lost him just before the Spring of 2014. He had been sick for a while and on his last Christmas with us he spent the majority of the time sitting in his favorite armchair, the same one where years prior me and my brother used to curl up next to him, while he read stories to us.
Although the news of his passing were hardly surprising, being a close-knit family we all took it pretty hard.
I remember the exact moment I got the call.
I was in the kitchen and I was barefoot. My first apartment in Lisbon’s city centre had a few vintage elements, one of them being the kitchen floor: patterned large slabs of tile, a bit worn down, cold and rough to the touch.
My phone rang while I was preparing dinner. It was my Mom’s number but it was my brother who spoke, his voice trembling.
“It’s Pops.” He said. I held my breath, eyes focused on the floor tiles, preparing for the bad news to hit me like a furious wave on a stormy day. “He passed away this afternoon”. There was a pause. He added “The funeral’s tomorrow”.
I held my tears, told him I would be there first thing in the morning.
“Can you tell Dad to come pick me up at the train station?” I asked before hanging up, forgetting to wait for his reply. I stood in the kitchen for a while — numb, mind like a blank piece of paper, eyes still laser focused on the floor tile pattern — and next thing I knew I was on a train back to my hometown. It was like I was on autopilot.
How to not deal with loss
When I first got to the chapel I went in to comfort my Mom and my Grandma, I even cried with them for a while. The smell of funeral flowers made me sick to my stomach almost instantly so I decided to come outside and sit on the chapel’s steps. I cried some more, comforted by my good girl dog Boneca, as people kept coming and going, some offering empty words, others being genuinely empathetic.
Luckily the funeral agency had had the good sense of covering my Grandpa’s face with some sort of veil, so my last memory of his face is still one from when he was alive and happy.
The day of the funeral is a blur of sadness, anger and containment. I had to be strong, after all. Second to my Grandpa I was the one in charge, the one people relied upon to sort things like balancing savings accounts and knowing who to call when the attic roof was leaking.
My Grandpa was laid to rest on a Wednesday. That same week, on Friday, I was back in Lisbon, starting a new job.
I convinced myself that keeping busy was just what I needed. In order to remain functional, I swept my unresolved feelings of loss under the rug. Little did I know that eventually I would come to trip over my own emotional mess in such a colossal way that ignoring said feelings was just impossible.
The day of reckoning
A few months ago, I finally got around to see Mary Poppins Returns. All was fine and dandy until I get to the part where they sing Trip a Little Light Fantastic.
A small portion of the lyrics had me in tears (more like sobbing) almost instantly:
“ So when life is getting scary, be your own illuminary
Who can shine the light for all the world to see(…)
So when troubles are incessant
Simply be more incandescent”
I allowed myself a good cry but as soon as I had the chance, raised the issue with my therapist. After hearing me out, he brought to my attention that I might be experiencing something called “delayed grief”.
Grief, Interrupted
When you postpone your emotions to a loved one’s death until a later time, that is called “delayed grief”. If you experience any kind of major life event, that might make your unresolved feelings to surface and your reaction to them might be excessive and you might not even understand right away why you are feeling so emotional.
What I have come to realize is that although I was physically present at my Grandpa’s funeral, I didn’t get to properly say “Goodbye” to him. He was such an important figure in my life that it took me quite some time to come to terms with him being gone.
We have this beautiful, yet untranslatable word in Portuguese: “Saudade”. It means to long for something or someone who is absent, to feel said absence so deeply that it makes you nostalgic and melancholic. That is how I feel my Grandpa being gone.
Turning over a new leaf
I am glad I finally got to deal with my unresolved emotions. Over time they had become too heavy to carry and the journey I am about to embark requires me to check only the strictly necessary baggage.
I have decided to start a new life in a new country, come next August. I keep dreaming big, just like Grandpa taught me. I hope that wherever he is, he is proud of that.
