I Love You Endlessly

I Love You Endlessly

Content warning: This story contains themes of illness, separation, and emotional loss.

“I love you endlessly.”

I mouth the words while looking straight into the camera. I want him to know I’m looking right at him. A video call cannot truly do that, but he will know I mean it with everything in me.

Then I trace a heart in the air with both hands, and my grandfather smiles widely. Beside him, my grandmother adjusts her glasses and squints at the screen.

“I love you, and I can’t wait to see you in a few months.”

I repeat the words, slower this time, so he can read them clearly on my lips. My grandfather has never heard my voice. Not once. Not when I was born, not when I learned to speak, not when I cried, laughed, sang, or called for him from another room. He has lived his whole life in silence, deaf and unable to speak, and yet no one has ever communicated affection more beautifully than he does.

“I bought you both a postcard here in Utah,” I say, shifting my smile toward my grandmother. “I wrote a few words in it, but I’m not saying more. It’s supposed to be a surprise. I’ll put it in the mail tomorrow, on my way to work.”

She nods. My grandfather looks at me, waiting for the next movement of my lips, the next sign he can catch, the next piece of me the screen can carry across countries and seas.

I draw another heart in the air, then end the call, then go on with my day as usual.

I mail the card the next morning. I go to work. I answer emails, attend meetings, and eat lunch. Life moves forward, and I move with it. I do not know I am already standing at the edge of something.

The next week, I’m dressed for work and sitting on my couch in my rented apartment, staring at their names on the screen while the call rings and rings and rings.

They do not answer.

​​A weight settles into my stomach with each passing second. It has been our routine for some time now. Every Monday—morning for me, afternoon for them—I call them on Facebook video and they sit together on their sofa, making their usual clumsy effort to squeeze into the frame together. Sometimes my grandfather is too close and only half his face shows. Sometimes my grandmother leans forward too much and all I can see is her forehead and one eye. The sight always makes my heart swell with a familiar warmth.

My body stays still, patient, but my thoughts race through every possible reason they might not be picking up. I imagine what my grandmother would say. I just got back from church. I went to the supermarket. I was downstairs with the neighbor. I was in the kitchen and didn’t hear the phone.

But she does not answer.

Panic starts to needle through me. I do not want to leave for work without knowing for sure that nothing has happened, so I call my mother instead.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “We just went to see them. They were fine.”

Fine.

The word loosens something in my chest, though not entirely.

She tells me my grandmother did not sleep well the night before and wanted to take half a sleeping pill and lie down for the rest of the day. Without her, there is no easy way to talk to my grandfather either.

I let myself breathe again.

I’ll get them next week, I tell myself.

*

I do not get next week.

I only get three days.

I am at work when my cousin’s message appears on my phone.

Grandfather had a stroke. We’re at the hospital now.

For a moment, the office looks exactly the same. The lights hum overhead. Someone laughs down the hall.

Then my mother’s words return to me from the other day.

They were fine.

And with them come my own.

I’ll get them next week.

I remain at my desk long after everyone else leaves. By seven o’clock I am alone in the office, surrounded by silence and artificial light, my laptop open in front of me, flight tabs multiplying across the screen. I check the tickets again and again. The prices are too high. The trip is too long. The connections are bad. Every option looks punishing, impossible, irresponsible.

I close one tab and open another. My fingers hover over the keyboard, shaking. I tell myself I should give it a little more time, that buying a ticket in a panic is not the best decision.

So I wait.

He will be fine, I tell myself. He has to be. I will see him in two months, when my internship ends. I only have to hold on until then.

Two months.

That is what I tell myself. As if the body waits for our plans. As if love can be postponed.

Monday comes. I call. They answer. Relief pours through me. He is home. He is sitting upright. He seems well.

“Grandpa,” I mouth, smiling too brightly. “Can you see me?”

He looks at me. Nothing in his face changes.

I try again, slower this time, shaping each word with care. Still nothing. He keeps staring at the screen blankly, then he turns his head toward my grandmother and asks her something in sign language.

His hands move more slowly now. The gestures seem to drag, as though thought itself has grown heavy. My grandmother signs something back, and although I do not know every sign, I understand this one.

Your granddaughter.

The realization hits me hard. He does not recognize me.

The room tilts, steadies, then tilts again. My stomach tightens into a hard knot. My skin goes cold. I hear myself gasp for air, but the sound feels distant, as if it belongs to someone else in the room.

He was not fine.

I was wrong.

I was wrong not to buy the expensive tickets the moment I heard. I was wrong to wait for a few more days. I was wrong to act as if time owes me anything. As if I had earned two more months simply because that is what suited my life, my schedule, my wallet.

A horrible thought takes shape inside me, sharp and merciless.

I love you endlessly, but not enough to spend my money on you when it mattered most.

Shame hits first. Then regret. After that I can’t separate them. I cannot tell which is heavier. They press down on me together until I fear I might collapse under both.

*

I book the flight that same night.

After that, everything turns frantic.

I throw clothes into a suitcase without looking at what I am packing. I forget half the things I need and remember them only after I have zipped it shut. I check my passport three times, then panic and check again. I charge my phone, my laptop, my headphones. My thoughts scatter in every direction.

From the moment I leave for the airport, every inconvenience feels like cruelty.

Traffic is too slow. The line at check-in is long and barely moves. Security stops me over a bottle of water I forgot I had. A family in front of me argues over a carry-on bag that is too large, and I want to scream. A child starts crying two lines over, and the sound drills into my skull. Someone drops a metal bottle and the crash makes me jump as if a gun has gone off.

I keep checking my phone. I keep checking the departure board, terrified the gate will change, the flight will be delayed. When boarding begins, relief flickers through me.

It does not last.

We are delayed on the runway. Then there is turbulence. Then we land late.

I run through the airport for my connection with my backpack pounding against my shoulders and my breath tearing in my throat. The fluorescent lights blur overhead. The signs seem too far apart. Every terminal feels endless. I pass storefronts, bright advertisements, rows of strangers who have nowhere urgent to be. I envy everyone around me for going about an ordinary day.

My phone is almost out of battery. The charging station does not work. I buy water and forget to drink. I sit, stand, pace, sit again. I message relatives and hate every delayed response. I feel drained with exhaustion and tight with dread.

I am convinced, with a certainty close to obsession, that I am moving toward him while he is moving away from me.

I do not know where the feeling comes from. I only know it settles deep inside me and refuses to leave. It follows me from one airport to the next, from one gate to another, across oceans and waiting areas and cramped airplane seats.

I think of the last time I hugged him. I hold on to that part the most. The dry warmth of his skin. The comfort of being hugged by someone who has loved me since before I knew what love was. I hunt through my memory for every detail as if I can rebuild him from fragments. He smelled like soap and old clothes and what I only now understand was home.

One final stretch.

I am coming.

I am almost there.

*

The plane lands in my home country. I collect my luggage. I step outside. I made it. I crossed the sea. I survived the delays, the panic, the sleeplessness, the endless transit between one bland ceiling and another.

Then I see my mother. And the relief dies before it can fully form. Her face tells me all there is to know.

I am too late.

Outside, life continues without interruption. Cars still pass. Someone laughs nearby. A suitcase wheel rattles over pavement. A plane lifts into the darkening sky. Everything around me feels unchanged and indifferent, while inside, my world is breaking apart.

I do not remember much of the drive after that. Only flashes. Streetlights blurring across the window. My mother crying quietly in the car. My own hands lying useless in my lap. The city looking both familiar and strange. The same thought keeps repeating in my head: I was coming. I was coming. I was coming.

But he left anyway.

At some point, I speak with my grandfather for the last time, and I am so clueless about it. I think it is just another Monday call. Just another trace of a heart in the air. Just another promise to see him soon.

How little attention I pay to such invaluable moments while they are still in the present. How ignorant I am of the gestures he shows me through a tiny screen, of the worth of a smile, of a familiar movement of the hand. I live inside those moments carelessly. I assume there will be more. I rely on tomorrow with arrogance.

But then it’s too late.

Always too late.

Life feels fair, in a way. It gives me many happy moments with the people I love, but only one moment that changes everything for the worse. At first, the scale seems balanced in my favor. The ratio is many to one, after all.

Many afternoons filled with laughter. Many meals. Many ordinary calls. Many embraces.

One tragedy.

Many to one.

It sounds generous.

Then the tragedy comes, and I realize it does not remain a single moment. It multiplies.

After that, life gives me many moments again, only these are made of grief. Many empty Mondays. Many reflexes of reaching for the phone. Many memories that ache instead of soothe. Many reminders that the world kept moving when I needed it to stop.

*

At the funeral, people tell me he knew I loved him.

They tell me he would have understood.

They tell me I should not torture myself.

They tell me this because they are kind, and because there is nothing else to say in the presence of a coffin.

I stand over him and look at the stillness of his face, the stillness that no longer resembles sleep, and all I can think is that I crossed oceans for this final nearness and still failed to arrive in time.

I want one more Monday. One more traced heart in the air. One more chance to shape the words lovingly and watch recognition bloom in his eyes. Even the card I mailed never reaches his hands. It, too, arrives too late.

Instead there is polished wood beneath my fingers. Wax-scented air. Black clothing. Quiet sobs. Relatives speaking in murmurs.

He had always lived in silence, but it had never felt this tragic before.

My hand trembles as I rest it on the edge of the coffin.

He cannot hear me.

He never could.

But all his life he knew how to read love when it was placed before him.

So I look at him one last time, let the tears blur my sight, and form the words with my lips as carefully as I did through that little screen, as carefully as if he might still lift his eyes and understand.

“I love you endlessly.”