Writer: Gabriel Hilty
Editors: Jessica Yi and Alloe Mak
Dedicated to Grandpa Bill, Grandma Flaurie, and Grandma Janet. I love you all so, so much.
Most of our lives are constantly up in the air. From the simple things like figuring out what to cook for dinner to more consequential events like university acceptances, we often don’t know what’s next in our stories.
In contrast, death is definitive.
Like the guarantee of filing taxes or the time until the Earth becomes uninhabitable, there’s no way out. Because of how it invades everyone’s lives, death impacts us most when we’re here. And yet, people often shy away from talking about it.
The journey of dealing with death is something I think about as a constant process of learning. In essence, the antithesis of death and its sudden nature. For the three times I’ve dealt with death, three things have stood out to me:
- The struggle to understand
My first encounter with death came when I was four years old; my grandpa died just a couple of weeks after flying from New York to see me for my birthday. I remember we played with toy cars in front of a frosted window in the hotel he was staying in.
The funeral home was dimly lit and grey. I stood at the back, right next to an office-esque water cooler. Watching the people milling around, I filled up the half-size plastic cups from the dispenser and handed them to everyone who passed by.
My water cooler moment is the only thing I remember from the funeral, even though by age four children can label emotions, understand time, and have long been able to recognize people. I couldn’t yet understand death and its permanence, something that typically develops fully later in childhood (Longbottom & Slaughter, 2018).
Today at 19, I understand more, but I still struggle sometimes, catching my thoughts wandering from How is he not here anymore? to the cliché Someone needs to wake me up from this nightmare moment.
Sometimes I wish I was still that kid at the water cooler, watching people mourn and move on rather in unknowing bliss.
- Just one piece of the puzzle
My second experience of death came years later in 2021 as the world was slowly loosening restrictions from the height of COVID-19. Even though my grandma had been diagnosed and living with a brain tumour for more than six years, she was still present, and we talked every week on Facetime.
I visited her in the Jersey nursing home she was staying at two months before she passed away. It was still warm, and the sun felt nice sitting on the patio eating food from the diner. We almost killed ourselves laughing because she ate the massive tomato in her cheeseburger in about five seconds.
Because her death happened quickly and relatively unexpectedly, the feelings of sadness and loss were tossed together with the normal recent memories of just being together. I remember sitting in my bio class hearing the news and not being able to comprehend it properly; I had just visited, and everything was normal.
Looking back today after many more bio classes and time to process, grief and the reality of someone you’ve known your whole life being gone are both parts of my grandma’s picture that are important and that I can’t erase.
The family pictures hanging in the stairway, or driving by her house with its yellow door and decidedly ugly curtains, remind me of the other puzzle pieces that complete the image.
Without them, a hollow centre missing the pieces of her life, each puzzle piece with its grooved edges interlocking but leaving an unfinished picture.
- Support when it’s most needed
The most recent time I’ve had to deal with death was the passing of my other grandma this May. Living in New York where there is currently no medical assistance in dying (MAID) like in Canada, she had to spend her final weeks in a hospital in the city.
Nurses and doctors walked by as I sat on a chair next to her bed. We looked at some old family pictures that her kids brought in the other day, pointing to all the people we recognized and smiling at the 80s hairstyles and outfits.
Over the week I was there along with dozens of other family and friends stopping by, her condition worsened. With days passing, the phrase I don’t want to remember her like that came up.
Supporting and taking care of someone who took care of me and was a big part of my life is something I didn’t want to and couldn’t walk away from. Still, it meant watching someone I loved slowly fade away.
Holding hands with my grandma and watching whatever TV was on at that time is one of my saddest and most treasured memories. Her mind was always sharp, even though her physical self was barely present.
During a Seinfeld marathon, she gathered the energy to mumble oh this isn’t a good one when a new episode started. She nodded her head when five of her friends were arguing loudly about whether a hot dog stand outside was kosher or not. And she always remembered to crack her knuckles every couple of minutes.
Being with someone at their weakest isn’t something easy, but the times when the people we care about aren’t doing well are often the times when they need the most support.
Holding her hand, I thought about all the times she was there for me.
Death and how it affects you is weird. Even though everyone takes on life, collectively heading towards the inevitable, our individual experiences with death when we’re alive and how we process afterward can be vastly different.
To this day, I’m still learning about death. This lesson is one that I think I’ll never perfectly understand. A lesson not meant for A+’s.