Grief, obituaries, and choosing words to say

I helped a friend write an obituary this week. It was one of those acts of kindness that come after you tell your friend that you are there for them and will do anything, not knowing what anything really means. It’s just a feeling when you say it.

Grief is a complex enemy and friend. It comes and goes. It sucker-punches you just when you are feeling better. It’s there when you don’t know it is. Sometimes you run away from it. Sometimes you can’t escape it. You feel it all around, even when you can’t feel anything. When you are numb to everyone and everything.

When you first learn you are losing a grandparent, you become a little kid. You never grow up when you think of what your grandparents meant to you. Summer vacations. Picking you up from school. Cookies. Big hugs. The kind that you get lost in.

When I was a kid, nana and tata gave us brothers a place to escape. When it was time to get picked up to go home, we always wanted to stay longer. Everything is fun when your parents aren’t around to stop you from doing the things that grandparents always let you do. Life with them was always a little more open, a little riskier, a little more like the life you wanted.

Then we get older. Every few years, you lose a grandparent and then another. All those feelings come back. The kind of feelings…