I eat a grief sandwich
I wear a grief coat
I see a grief film
-Lorde
A month after my aunt died, I found myself in a crystal shop. I wasn’t there for myself. I didn’t hold any stock in the woo-woo notion that a rock could channel some kind of divine energy. I was there to buy my cousin a zodiac manifestation candle, one that was meant to harness all her Scorpio energy and turn her into the kind of celestial force men cower from (not that she needed much help). Instead, I cried in front of the kind woman who had opened the shop only a week before.
No one teaches you how to grieve. As a kid, I lost people almost without consequence. I was too young to understand, to process, to wrap my arms around the loss and hold it. I never knew how heavy it was.
I cried the night she died, and again as they lowered her into the ground, but all the days in between were empty. I was sad, and I missed her, but I was also angry and confused. I didn’t understand, and even now, I still don’t, how someone could be there one day and gone the next—simply gone. Standing in a room full of people in their funeral best with my mom crying into my shoulder, for the first time in my life, I wished for some faith.
A month later, and almost two years into writing my novel, I was fist-fighting writer’s block and walking aimlessly up and down my small town’s main street. Whatever I was doing wasn’t working. The pieces weren’t fitting together like they were supposed to, and my main character’s dead parent sat taunting me from the margins of her story.
I walked into the apothecary with no real purpose and thought my cousin might like something for Christmas. I plucked her forty-dollar candle from its shelf and, when I found no one at the register, went to look at all the crystals lining the walls.
My eyes glazed over each pile without registering their names, shapes, or colors until they snagged on a pile of pale blue stones, round and veiny. I picked one up and felt the sting at the backs of my eyes. My throat tightened, and I squeezed the stone in my fist.
I don’t know how long I was stood there when I hand landed on my shoulder and I realized I was crying. The shop owner told me it was Angelite, and that it was meant to foster connections with guardian angels and help bring peace of mind. She asked if I had recently lost someone. I paid fifty dollars for the candle and stone and cried the whole way home.
That weekend, I overhauled the entire beginning of my novel. It couldn’t be about the burgeoning relationship between two strangers in the South of France anymore. Instead, it needed to be about a young woman learning to live with loss. The violence of it—all the anger and confusion and desperation that comes when you open yourself up to the healing.
Each chapter tears me open again. Takes me back to the moment I cried on the sidewalk, then flashes forward to my cousin and I moving her old furniture around her apartment that would soon be mine, singing to a favorite song of hers, looking up at the sky with a smile each time something went wrong. I relive the numbness of holding my mom while she cried and swallow down the memory of the last time I saw her, a goodbye that still tastes sour on my tongue.
I thought writing through it would help me get over it, but the only thing I’ve learned is that I never will. To grieve someone is to love them, to remember them, and to acknowledge the hole they’ve left. To be grateful they were there at all.
Three years later, the piece of Angelite still sits on my bookshelf, next to the small figurine I found upon moving into her old apartment, a room away from where I fold my sweaters into the dresser of hers that’s now mine.