Last monday, my grandpa had a heart attack. 

I was about to send him a picture of my bike covered in snow when I got the call that he’d been rushed to the hospital and taken to the ICU, where his breathing needed to be stabilized so they could start “doing procedures” and hopefully have him sent home sometime before the weekend. 

On tuesday, he was well enough for procedures to be done, and as procedures were being done, the doctors paused and said his heart was, in fact, far too damaged: all four valves were now beyond repair, open heart surgery no longer an option given the severity of the case and his age. But he was still asleep and it would be better to wait until he left the ICU to break the news, because he could still go on to live for weeks, months or even years, but that would require major lifestyle changes and he needed to be a bit stronger to start coming to terms with them. 

On wednesday, he woke up feeling great, laughing and talking nonstop about how healthy he was and how badly he wanted to go home, since there was “absolutely nothing wrong” with his heart. He had food and visitors, and was yapping away about his only granddaughter and how she bikes everywhere in Amsterdam, even in terrible weather. On my side of the Atlantic, everything was white and slippery. On his side, everything was boring and sterile, and he couldn’t wait for life to go back to normal. 

On thursday, while still in bed in the ICU, my grandpa had a second heart attack. 

I was told doctors had spent a full hour trying to bring him back, but his heart was too weak to keep beating. He was resting, and then he was dead. When the phone woke me up in the early hours of the day, I just knew it. I got up to answer the call, heard the words and couldn’t say anything other than “no, no, no”, then started wailing so loudly a tourist taking photos outside looked up to see where the sound was coming from, as I covered my mouth instinctively. Every day since, at one point or another, that wail bursts out of my chest, an exhale of sadness, a strange sound I recognize too well as someone who’s spent more than half of her life grieving.

My grandpa was very stubborn, to the point of it being his most consistent trait. He refused to stop living the way he wanted to, building houses with white picket fences, going on long walks, tending to his garden. He also refused to be seen as old, at risk, sick, dying, and it brings me a small amount of comfort to know that he left this earth before ever hearing about it. He was consistent in his stubbornness and just as consistent in his love for me. He made an effort to be in my life as much as possible, teaching me his crazy engineering tricks, making all my theater costumes, showing me how to use the sewing machine at a time I could've easily sewn through my tiny fingers, but he just knew I wouldn't. 

He trusted me to have the tools and use them, and when I told him I was leaving home at nineteen, he gave me five hundred bucks and said “go, but come back if you need to”. He was the only person, myself included, to see my loosely conceived plan of moving to a place I’d only ever been to once as something promising. He told me to go and he called me often, then learned how to text and started sending me voice notes, making sure I knew that every single month there would be a hundred bucks in my bank account — an allowance that had evolved from ten bucks in the 1990s — to help me buy groceries. I would tell him I no longer needed the money and he’d just keep it coming, a voice note saying “I just came back from the bank” following each deposit, as to remind me that someone out there still cared that I had something nice to eat for dinner.

When his second wife died, he called me to say he finally understood what I’d been going through, having previously been so confounded by the depths of my sorrow as an orphaned teenager. I started crying. “It all makes sense now”, he told me, “it is the loneliest of feelings” — from that moment on, we’d talk about grief in a way I wasn’t able to with the rest of my “they’re in a better place now” lapsed-catholic family. He’d tell me about the plants he’d been growing, the changes he’d made around the house, how many miles he’d been walking each day, and those conversations always reminded me of one of my favorite poems:

We all have reasons  for moving,  I move to keep things whole.

Grandpa, like me, seemed to take Strand’s words quite literally.

Today, while looking through my browser, I came across some of the tabs I’d left open: an European Journal of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery study arguing that “survival in elderly patients with severe aortic stenosis is dramatically improved by aortic valve replacement”, from the short interval when surgery was still in question; a couple different mobility scooters I thought we should buy him, since he’d have to limit his movements once he was out of the hospital; a search for “risks in stent placement after heart attack”, on day one, when that was all I needed to worry about regarding his upcoming “procedures”; and “life expectancy with blocked and calcified valves”, when I allowed my rarely presenting but all-encompassing hopeful spirit to take over and just needed Google to validate it. 

I see these tabs and I see the whiteness of the snow on my bike outside, as if no time has passed, as if we're still there, in the before, when the phone hadn't woken me up yet, when it hadn't made my gut freeze because of the news I could tell were coming. It is a very strange thing to then break the spell and attempt to string together these words, knowing I now live in a world where there will be no more monthly voice notes, no more phone calls about peregrine falcons and how to keep them from eating my cats (which was never a concern to me, but he sure was worried), no more texts asking him to call me anytime he wanted to chat, followed by phone calls where detailed explanations of what I did for a living ultimately amounted to “still making art, then”. It is a very strange thing to exist when the last person who cared for me since before I could even speak is no longer here. I feel untethered, overcome by that initial whiplash that sends the kite into a spin before it can even tell no one’s holding on to it. 

No one’s holding on to me.

So I mourn, I grieve, I go to the literature. My rituals, detached from organized religion, remain effective, as I cry and read and write and sit in bed thinking I don’t want to be here, but my grandpa has always been proud of me for staying, and also moving when needed, and having my little art community and riding my bike with my silly heart and its faulty valves that for years have concerned him. I wonder if I’ll also die of a broken heart, and if so, I hope it won’t break anyone else’s. I once again have panic attacks — they used to be under control, but death is always the exception — and as I fear my chest is about to explode, I think of his last moments and hope that he didn’t. I hope he didn’t feel pain, because all he offered me over the past three decades was the complete opposite: he was brilliant and wonderful, the picture of a grandparent who did everything in his power to make me feel cared for and truly wanted. 

The snow is gone and I can no longer slip on the sidewalk on purpose. This thursday marked my first full week without him and I cried alone in the kitchen. I’ve yet to uncover what it is that I’m feeling, but for the first time in my life it’s not the ocean I see when I reach for meaning. I see the sky, I see the tension, I see the moment of rupture. I see nothing beyond it. I miss him and I miss myself as seen through his eyes: as someone’s daughter, someone’s  grandchild, someone who was once small and cried alone in the kitchen. 

My dad died eighteen years ago today. Everyone else is gone.
“It all makes sense now”, I tell you, “it is the loneliest of feelings”.