On the edge of everything

Part 17

Lacey comes into my room early Sunday morning. She has been here just a few days and I feel like the old rhythms from years past have begun to feel normal again. I am half awake when she crawls into my bed. I move towards the wall as she takes over the space and wraps the blankets around her.

"It's Sunday," she tells me. I turn so that I am facing her but my eyes remain shut as sleep continues to call for me.

"Ten years ago today," she states and the sleep stops calling as I am drawn into the waking world of problems and sisters wishing for comfort on the anniversary of our grandpa's death.

"Yep." I look down at my wrist that occupies the mattress space between me and Lacey, still in a cast, the frequent pain of the last ten years replaced with a dull ache.

"How do you feel?" she asks.

I breathe in deeply. "I forgot until mom mentioned the cemetery yesterday." I pause, chastising myself for being so nonchalant when Lacey's eyes are telling me she is upset. "How about you?" Lacey was closer with grandpa. He was the first person either of us knew who died, but it hit each of us in different ways. Part of this came from age: I was only 8 years old when he died, just a little kid who didn't know my grandpa beyond hugs and construction projects and trips to the zoo. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's when I was 5; my strongest memories of him, wrist included, are based in forgotten names and shaky steps and nursing home craft rooms.

To me, his death was a thing of disruption to my routine and the addition of sadness to springtime. I missed a few days of school and had to take my multiplication test late; my piano lessons were put on hold while my afternoons were spent with my parents and grandma and Lacey at the nursing home. I hardly felt any of the sadness that filled the air and the first time that I cried was a year later, hidden in the crowd of family reconvening at the cemetery for the first anniversary. Even then, I think that I cried more out of guilt than of sadness.

Lacey was older, about to end middle school and enter SC. She was not only old enough to more deeply contemplate the meaning and finality of death, she was old enough to know my grandpa as a person, not just as a forgetful old man. She had him before he was sick, before the nursing home; she didn't have her wrist tingling as the primary reminder of the loss.

She was bawling at the funeral and has faithfully held my grandma's hand at the cemetery every year since.

And here we are again; another year has passed. It has now been a decade and the aunts and uncles and cousins are flying up from California and New Mexico. Grandma and grandpa lived down there, too, and that's where my mom grew up, but New Mexico lacks the neurological resources of our large research hospital. So, when he was diagnosed, they left the rest of the extended family to come here, leaving much of the work to my mom. After he died, my grandma was settled here, and didn't want to leave the last home that they lived in together. She also didn't want to go back to the place of their early marriage.

"I'm the same," Lacey says, meaning sad. "I keep thinking that every year it's going to feel a little easier, but it still hurts the same, you know?"

"Sure," I respond mindlessly. I think that a few months ago I would have left it at that, limiting communication and sharing of emotions. But now, with the person that I am becoming, I continue. "Lacey, it's been ten years," I pause. "Why does it still affect you so much?" She turns onto her back, staring up at the ceiling where we put up glow-in-the-dark stars in the shape of the capricorn constellation; Her bed holds the same stars mapped out for aquarius.

"It was when I knew that childhood and innocence and all of that was over." She doesn't hesitate with this explanation; she's known this for a while. She knows why this affects her and every year this day must feel like the anniversary of the realization of the permeability of the safe, protective bubble that our parents created for us. And that's how I feel about Lena and James. The day that Lena and Eliza died and I saw Vien and her life being catastrophically altered, my protective walls were starting to break; the moment that Jessie told us about James, it shattered. That childhood innocence and the beautiful safe life within the world my parents created was gone and I was punched in the gut by reality.