When I woke from my wedding night, lying still to not wake my wife, I thought of you. You bubbled up into my mind, dissolved. Since your death, you’ve never stayed long. That morning, I glimpsed you in the infant memory of my wedding, in the honored, discreet seat you would have occupied as my grandmother.
In the low light, my wife was breathing gently through her nostrils. You would have loved her. At the reception, you would’ve clucked over her dress, glistening with restrained joy at your family’s newest member. She would’ve smiled and then crinkled the corners of her mouth sweetly, politely, containing the overflowing affection she keeps for her elderly loved ones.
That July morning in 2020, I glimpsed you because I had awoken on the shore of marriage, the first season of my life that you wouldn’t know. As a grandmother forever arriving on another plane, you had known all my seasons. But now, in the land where you held fifty-seven years of wisdom, I’m without you—actually gone and not returning, I still remind myself. You’re not even a voice over the phone, anymore.
Only one other land had imprinted your absence as keenly. It was a deceptively calm Irish suburb, where I studied at University College Dublin in the fall of 2018. You had died on May 1. It hadn’t settled. I did my best to reinvent myself, to vainly escape the weight of grief.
Even now I still hope, futilely but sincerely, that you would’ve approved of the one identity that I could keep.