April 29th would have been my Grandfather’s 92nd birthday. He died in October, but it is only now, slowly, that my mind is beginning to accept that he is gone. I thought about him last night when I admitted a desperately unwell 92 year-old gentleman with pneumonia. I thought about him last week when I came across a four-leaf clover on a walk. I think about him every time anyone asks me, “so where are you from, then?” – which is every time anyone first hears my name.
I think about everyone I have lost especially often when their birthday comes around – Mike (“the same day as Princess Anne”), Tone, my Nanny and Dziadz – a sad kind of thinking, the kind that makes the end of your nose red and shiny, and distorts the top of your throat in an uncomfortable way, the kind that makes your breathing shallow and your heart hurt a little, and stirs up those more painful moments that are too dangerous to revisit on a regular basis. That time I hung the phone up too soon, cut off a conversation too early, the years I was less often in touch.
I think about them at work every day.
But I remember them also in the little moments, the beautiful moments, the day-to-day. The flash of a shooting star (did you ever make it through?), the thousands of tiny rainbows thrown off of a crystal hanging in my window, the grand orchestral end of a Looney Tunes cartoon (“that’s all, folks!”). The brightly coloured children’s magazines with their little plastic toys, the sugary stickiness of jammy doughnuts, the tea stains that gather at the bottom of mugs, the colour purple.
When those moments come around I feel the edges of my mouth lift a little, and I breathe a little more freely. I stop what I am doing for a second, I savour the grace of it all, I allow and welcome this punctuation of my day.
I am not good at letting go.
This is how I say goodbye.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.
Mary Oliver
-Z
Mad to Live 