Grief

Loss is soft. It's gushy. You sink your teeth into it and everything comes pouring out all messy.

June is a month of loss for me. It is also a month of celebration. I still have trouble merging the two together.

My papaji, my father's father, passed away six years ago yesterday. Father's day is this weekend. I will always carry my papaji in my heart along with the smells of saffron and incense and sandalwood.

My grandmother, my mother's mother, would be celebrating her birthday in a couple of days. She passed away several years ago, but her memory remains.

My mother was recently looking over some old pictures and stories. It's lovely, the way the past can intertwine with our "nows" like vines crawling up old stalks.

My mother sent me a copy of something I'd written for my grandmother, an immature piece of writing that reminds me of who I am. It is shared below:

Memories are like the stars.

I don't remember all of them, and it's true that some of them are more distant than others, some more vivid and bright. But they are all there somewhere, and each one makes up the same sky. I find it strange how the stars are holistically intangible-I cannot feel, touch, hear or smell them, and even sight becomes relative when you consider their distance. But yet--and here is how they are like my memories--I sense them more strongly than any of my other senses allow.

It is the chill up my arm hairs, the way my neck can stay for hours strained upward, the way breaths catch in my upper throat. This is how I remember you. I may not be able to recall all of the details, like the smell of your house, the feel of your fingers as we pressed the skin together, fascinated by how it stuck, or the sound of your footsteps down the basement steps---but I feel those memories like I feel the stars.

Funny how nostalgia is thick, the way honeysuckle is thick, the way Mississippi summers are thick. Viscous too, moving slowly and heavily until drips can no longer be called drips. They convalesce into a sweat that covers my whole body. You cannot wipe off nostalgia because when you try, it keeps coming like that sweat on a hot day.

So now, when I look up at the stars, I remember everyone I love. Grandpa is there, and Tyler. Mataji and Papaji are there, and when I am away, my parents are there. Nina is there when we are apart, and even strangers remain hidden memories between the stars, somewhere between the horizon and the limits of our perspectives.

And you are always there. I think you're somewhere in the Milky Way, because wherever I see it go on forever like that, I think of how your spirit is always going on forever.

You leave a trail of stars behind you, wherever you go.