Grief is hard. It is a thing, a noun, an entity, at once fluid and smoky, heavy as stone and light as a breeze. I have to write now to move on from this morning, when I took a deep dive into it, into the losses of both lives and of what could have been. So much digging in the muck, in the filth of the past. My god, how have I survived even as well as I have?

Who was the first? My Grandpa John, he was in and out of hospital, but left us so suddenly, or at least so it seemed to an 8 year old. Then my cat, Uncle Andre Kitty died suddenly and it tore me apart. I sat at his kitty grave in the garden, next to a cross I made for him out of sticks I lashed together. My mother’s cousin died suddenly, she was sad and reclusive for a day or so, she said it was a sudden aneurism, but maybe it was suicide, who knows, and now I can’t ask her. Finally, my other grandpa, my mother’s father, who’s stroke and alcoholism put him in a home, on a drip, and he never returned home from that. I tried to visit him once, but it was too scary, and he died when I wasn’t living at home anymore and I didn’t go to the funeral. He had been dead to me for so long already, so different than the man in the photos, pictures taken while travelling, while he was alive and happy. To me he was always the corpse in the chair, at the table, checking his stocks in the paper, smoking, drinking, and occasionally spouting nonsense at the holiday dinnr table, ruining everyone else’s time. How narcissistic it is, alcoholism, with the ill person at the center of everything, always, even if they are not participating. It is covert, at its best, and hatefully destructive at its worst. Unfortunately, I have known al kinds. I didn’t go to his funeral and even when I last saw my Grandmother, at her 80th birthday, she was disappointed I didn’t show and told me as much, but how could she not understand why, even so many years later? How could she not see how his drinking had ruined things for everyone, even me?

These deaths could all be seen as normal or expected, in some way. But then the overdoses came. The first was Jajo perhaps? Or Terry’s brother? Then Emily. Then came Laura, who wanted to get out but just couldn’t help herself. She died on the way to LA straight from leaving rehab, Promises, Sober Living by the Sea. She was on her way to Jessica’s to see her for her birthday. She never arrived, and we all knew why – she’d stopped to get high and that was it. The silence was deafening, we all waited, but there was no news. Finally the call came, days later. Her body was found in a transient hotel in downtown LA, and her mom had to fly out to identify her. She was 24.

Who else? To make a list is so painful. Then was my Gramma, the biggest hit of all. She was my world, my only motherly love, the warmth, gone, so suddenly. Killed by pancreatic cancer, it was just six months between her diagnosis and her death. Destroyed me, and also my father. He was shaken to his core, as she’d been the one that had always held everyone together, and they all fell apart after that. I remember the morning of the funeral, we were at her house. All of us had gathered the night before, after the wake, telling stories, searching for comfort. In the morning, I realised that the carpet needed vacuuming, she wouldn’t ever have received guests in such a state. So I vacuumed, realising that no one else was going to do it. From that point on, I felt like I was the matriarch, at least in my branch of the family.

Then, in California and so suddenly, there was Brody, my brother’s best friend he’d probably ever had, the friend that showed him a softer side of masculinity. I swear I felt his spirit leave this earth as I drove into the sunset on the 91 on my way back into LA from Corona, where the family was living. A family already broken, this loss made everything come crashing down. We all knew and loved him, so it hurt us all. Then came the death, the slow painful death of my parents’ marriage. With me having to step in to try to save my baby sister, who was still so young, just in high school. Mom had her arrested for breaking curfew in the early morning hours, after leaving the house to get some air after they’d had a huge row. I paid for her to have a phone, in case the phone bill wasn’t paid for by one of our parents as part of a responsibility row. One day she called me on it, as mom was about to have her arrested again. I had to talk to the cops to explain that there was something wrong with my mother, and to not arrest my sister. I moved my sister to live with me in DC, realising that living in squalor with my father in an apartment in Corona, with her boyfriend sleeping over and barely passing high school, was not going to end well. I moved her to live with me, in my single girl apartment in DC, making a bedroom with a curtain out of the dining room.

Then Dad got really sick. He’d had a gastric bypass a couple of years prior and was no longer obese. Quite the opposite, he had withered away to practically nothing. Plus, he was drinking, and it went right through him. The story goes that Mom told Camille that she’d seen him driving around town using a grapefruit to hold his head up. That’s how weak he was. He’d been in the hospital, and back out again, from something or another. Then he went back in, after Mom didn’t show up to take him to the doctor, when he couldn’t get there on his own. I remember waiting for the bus to come to go to work in DC, and called her in California see how the appointment had gone. Well, she’d slept through her alarm and didn’t seemed too fussed about it. Then he went back in the hospital, the local community hospital. He needed to be moved for treatment but couldn’t be, because the COBRA hadn’t been paid, the coverage that you pay for to continue coverage after you’ve left or lost a job, in Dad’s case it was the later, as he was too weak to work. She could have paid it, but she didn’t. That’s when I knew I had to go.

So I left to California, to try to save dad. Long story short, it didn’t work. Two and a half months later, on February 9th, he was gone.