Waves of grief mix into beautiful memories

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/04/2021 (1789 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The other day, Facebook showed me an old selfie I’d taken with my Amma (Icelandic for grandma).

“Shelley, here is your most-loved photo of 2014,” read the caption, with a large button underneath inviting me to share this memory with my Facebook friends.

There we were, our heads resting together and smiling at the camera, trapped in a moment of time.

Amma died in 2015. She had the privilege of living longer than most. She had always been old for as long as I’d known her — only really advancing in age in the last decade of her life.

Her timeworn skin was like soft, wrinkly paper, almost translucent, and she smelled of the sweetest combination of perfume and mothballs. Amma was a proud woman, devout in her beliefs and traditions, and in her Icelandic roots.

It would be a lie to portray her as perfect or romanticize her life. Her legacy is tarnished, though my mom would say, “She did the best she could with what she had.”

I loved her with my whole heart and she loved me.

When I saw that picture a wave of grief washed over me as I remembered her, not only on the day the photo was taken a year-and-a-half before she died, but well before that, too, in a time where she had always existed.

In these moments she turns up in a photo, or a memory, or in a song that takes me back to a particular place and time, my heart starts to ache for her.

It doesn’t matter how long she’s been gone, or she was so old and her mind ravaged by dementia when she died. It doesn’t matter life still moves forward and most of the time I have learned to live without her. Nor does it matter time has turned her memory into something I usually like to speak about without pangs of sorrow or sadness.

However, I still have moments when the loss of her stings me, knocking the wind out of me like a sucker punch.

Grief is strange. There is a poignant archived Reddit post by a person carrying the moniker GSnow from 2011, where they describe grief in a beautifully profound way. The post was in response to someone else who had simply posted “My friend just died, I don’t know what to do…”

GSnow explains they never got used to someone they loved dying, no matter the circumstance. “It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies. But I don’t want it ‘not matter.’ I don’t want it to be something that just passes.”

The post continues into an analogy comparing grief to waves. A shipwreck where everything around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that once was.

“In the beginning, the waves are 100-feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100-feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything… and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life…”

You may have read this post, I hope you have. In its entirety, the words are so beautiful and poignant and speak to anyone who has endured a loss. They translate a feeling that is sometimes hard to understand.

I shared the photo of Amma on Facebook, and I’ll probably share it next year again, when it pops up on my Facebook memories. Beyond the wave of grief that crashes are so many beautiful memories she left for me.

shelley.cook@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter @ShelleyACook