Time is not linear. If anything, it’s more of a strange, spirally, loopy shape, like a signature so peculiar it can hardly be read, let alone forged. Time does not move forward like elementary school students walking in a line. Time simply passes, like when your father breaks down in your arms after the death of his father: it is unexpected, backwards, unpredictable.
Memento mori: remember you must die. The idea seems like one you can understand, but only when you actually see it happen do you see how wrong you were for thinking you could possibly make sense of it, make sense of death. It cannot be prepared for. It cannot be controlled.
Grief, then, is equally odd, and fortunately or unfortunately, it is not mathematical. Grief defies formula, defies end behavior, defies asymptotes. Maybe you hadn’t cried for several days after your grandfather’s death, because you’d already exhausted yourself with sadness initially, but when you see your father weep you can’t help but do the same. Maybe your mornings are melancholic, and you’re preoccupied throughout your second period history class. But maybe your fifth period wakes you up, makes you laugh a little. And maybe you’re miserable again by your math class at the end of the day. So maybe you go home and you cry, one day alone in the shower and the next in your mother’s lap. In the end, grief consists of “maybe”s.
Just because it evades definition doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. My grief for my grandfather lingers nearly everywhere: in my favorite photographs, where I have a smile on my face and his arm around me, neither of which really exist anymore (is this a bad dream? Maybe he’s waiting for me to wake up and he’ll give me one last hug…); on the dining room chair that is perpetually unoccupied, that I can no longer bring myself to even sit across from (is this just a misunderstanding? Maybe it’s not yet time for dinner, and he’s just waiting to join us for a final meal…); in college essays I’ve written for schools that I’ve since heard back from, though the story I told then has a different ending now (is this some kind of sick joke? Maybe they meant to accept me, and he meant to celebrate with me…); even in my reflection in the mirror, because I have many of the features he’s since lost (is this even myself I look back at? Maybe I disappeared the very moment he did…). My grief is blind: it makes my eyes well with tears in the middle of conversations, yet stubbornly keeps them open at night. My grief doesn’t care for deadlines or major assessments. It’s not something to get over, it’s something to learn to live with.
Over and over I’ve heard that it gets better with time, that I’ll feel better by this weekend, by next month, by the summertime—all times that I can hardly wrap my head around. There are weekends, months, seasons that exist without him? It is still as unfathomable to me as the use of the past tense.
Memento mori. I know this like I know anything, I know this like I know imperfection, impermanence, and inevitability: I know it today, though I cannot speak for yesterday nor for tomorrow. Time and grief are not linear, and neither is life. I do not avoid my suffering, but I grieve for death, not life. I remember that there is joy in the little corners of my day, that while there may be pain there can still be peace, that I can make the most of my life one moment at a time. That I am fortunate to have ever taken photographs with him, to have sat across from him, to write of him, to look like him. That I am here, that I am alive, that this life is mine, that this life is worth living.