Death

My Omi died on the third day of the new year, a month before I turned 18. This past Wednesday was her birthday. I spent it in the house she lived in for more than 35 years with my granddad, and where my mom and aunts grew up.

I think one of the saddest things about death is that when someone dies, so do their memories and experiences. All we have are the stories she told out loud. It's too late now to hear the ones we forgot to ask her to tell, or to clarify pieces of one we can't quite remember how to put together.

I really miss knowing she's in the other room, sitting in her designated corner of the couch with a good book in her hands, trying to fend off my dog from plopping into his favorite spot on her lap only to laugh once he inevitably got there. I miss telling her about Sam when she asked, watching her eyes light up as she lived vicariously through my young love. This is the first of the rest of my summers without her.

She liked reading romance novels. My sister once asked if she ever got lonely without my granddad, who died in 2002. She responded, "A man would just get in my way." She liked mysteries more and more towards the end of her life. 

My aunt says she feels closer to my Omi than ever now that she's gone (she's a very spiritual person), but I think that's just a way she deludes herself so it doesn't hurt so badly. I don't judge her for it, though. We all have ways of coping with pain. Sometimes it's too immense to face head-on.

After she died, my Omi's earthly form came back in a black cardboard box affectionately labelled "cremains of Renate W. Moss". My aunt told my mom, sisters, and I about a time she cried into her mom's ashes, kneading them until her husband came in and had to gently pry them away so she wouldn't pop the plastic bag and send a puff of what was left of my Omi flying. She told us this story after my mom wondered aloud whether there were teeth scattered among the ashes.

My dog Copper was put down in February, on the day Slide by Calvin Harris and Frank Ocean came out. When I got the text from my mom 20 minutes after she sent it (there was no service in the building my school assembly was held in), I cried into the shoulder of some sophomore girl I'd never spoken to before and signed out of school early. I drove fast that day, sobbing to Slide on repeat and silently hoping I'd be pulled over so I could spill my guts to someone I didn't know. His ashes came in the prettiest polished wooden box, secured with the same type of lock and key that kept my childhood diaries' secrets from prying eyes. I wondered what they did with the metal plate in his pelvis. I wondered why it cost $200 to turn his body into dust. I pet the box and told him he was a good boy.

I still remember exactly what Copper's fur felt like when I stumble across photos of him. Some nights, as I'm trying to fall asleep, I still realize suddenly that I'll literally never be able to talk to my Omi again, and a wave of muted terror settles over me until all I can hear or feel is my heart beating out of my chest in the darkness. But what makes grief hurt less for me is the uncomfortable, hilarious rawness of its reality. 

My Omi told us years before she died that after she was gone, "Don't keep me in there for too long, I want to swim with Edwin." But of course she'll stay in her cardboard box until our extended family can coordinate when we're all free to scatter her into the ocean.