The sky brimmed with fireworks. A celebration of the new year erupted as I looked out from the window of a room that was swamped with silence. It had been four hours since my grandmother had spoken, but the beeping heart monitor offered a glimmer of hope. Ethan and I had been together for ten years, and we just couldn’t imagine the feeling of being apart. Here was a couple who had weathered times of turmoil and hardship for sixty years, and now they’d had an epiphany of the inevitability of death. As the clock ticked, my grandfather held his wife’s hand firmer, closer and tighter.
My grandmother passed away on 1 January 2009, and that’s how our new year started. Ever since she left us, my grandfather had hardly spoken; he’d spent most of his days doing things she’d loved. I noticed that he was struggling to cope with her absence. He was by himself most of the day in a house where every ounce of the building held a memory of her. We sold it and moved to an apartment in the city.
Immersed in beautiful
moments every day
Never in life
We thought of today
You left us
and
this world
in a blink of an eye
And the blank pages
of his final chapter
said
“Wait, to reunify”