I want to tell you a story about grief...

that’s really many stories all in one.

CW: talk of death, illness (diabetes and dementia), and grief.

The first person my mother told she was pregnant with me was her mother. Fitting. My mother was her mother’s favorite (which is another story altogether) and this sharing of confidences was only natural. Except, the other reason my mother shared this news, too early in her pregnancy to be sure of much, was because her mother was dying.

I don’t know if my grandmother had diabetes her entire life, but I know the disease shaped the end of her life significantly. She lost most of her eyesight, one of her legs, and suffered a series of ailments that might have been preventable if she were richer or whiter, but she was neither of those things, so after years of suffering, my mother and the rest of the family seemed to understand that the end was near.

I think my mother thought telling her mother that she would have another grandbaby soon was an entreaty to get her to stay; to live a little bit longer. Or maybe it was a gift before they parted, the sure knowledge that there was one more grandbaby to come. One more person who would remember her name. I’ll never know for sure because my grandmother died before I was born, and that conversation is understandably difficult for my mother to share with anyone, but especially me.

Here’s what I do know.

My entire childhood was full of grief over this death, and the death a few years before of my only uncle. I don’t know what my family was like before my mom and her sisters lost their only brother, but in death and their memories I know he became their favorite sibling. I’ll never know what my family spoke about over bowls of gumbo on a Saturday afternoon before my grandmother died, but after, it was her. Always her. The conversation might start off somewhere else, but we always ended up back with her, her memories, her accent, the gap in her two front teeth - the one I inherited and made sure Invisalign didn’t take away.

As an adult, I realize that most people don’t talk about grief as much as I do, but as a child, grief was what I knew best. In my family, we talked over and over again about the ones we lost. It changed the way we named ourselves (i.e. my middle name is a mashup of my grandmother’s and uncle’s names and those names have shown up in countless cousins and nieces and nephews since). Now to be clear, this is not new, people have been doing this for hundreds of years - commemorating the dead in the living -  but a new phase of those sentimental naming conventions in my family began with me and my Nana.

Grief shaped the way we understood time. For instance, my older brother was born after my uncle was killed, but he was the last grandchild to know our grandmother. As children, my brother, cousins, and I used this metric as a way to categorize ourselves and keep track of birth order, to group one another in the befores and afters. It was a handy marker of the passage of time: every year I grew older was one more year my mother had lived without hers and my grandfather had lived without his partner.

I realize now that this kind of life sounds morbid to some people, but to me, it was normal. In many ways, it still is.

As a child, my grandfather used to tell me all the ways I reminded him of my grandmother, and I delighted in that. Why wouldn’t I want to be compared to someone everyone around me loved? As a quiet but nosy child, my face - which was apparently the spitting image of my Nana’s - was like a key to open people’s hearts, minds, and mouths, convincing them to tell me stories about my Nana that made me feel like I knew her. My Great Aunt Dear - her nickname, not her legal name, but I think this tells you something about how my family feels about names. Anyway, Dear used to invite me into her house on hot summer days to give me candy and tell me stories about my Nana, her sister. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I think this healed something in her, to see her sister’s grandchild, to give me some special care and attention that my grandmother could not. I was a teenager before I understood that the woman who lived across the street from my grandparents’ home was related to me by blood. I just thought she was a family friend, not that it mattered much anyway. But Dear would look me square in the face and smile with soft brown eyes and big cheeks (we are a family of fantastic cheekbones) and cup my cheek with her warm, soft, wrinkled hand, and tell me things I think my grandmother might have told me. We lost Dear in 2019, but each time I saw her she recognized me - or her sister in me - no matter how bad the dementia got.

All because I looked like the grandmother I never knew.

All this grief, though, wasn’t mine. It made me feel safe and warm and loved, because I didn’t understand any of the loss, but I grew comfortable with it nonetheless.

As you might imagine, my grandfather and I were very close. I was his favorite. His baby. I’m certain his affection was partly a reflection of his grief - he loved me because he had lost the woman he loved, and he loved me well, because he had not always loved his children as well as he could - but as a child, what did I care about the reasons, I was my Popo’s favorite and it was a balm to all my childhood wounds.

I don’t know exactly, but the last years of his life, I think, mirrored my grandmother’s. In and out of the hospital, his three daughters trying to figure out how to get him the care he needed, and then get him to accept it. I don’t remember much about the specifics, just many visits to his hospital rooms across the East Bay until finally, I admitted to an older cousin that I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t handle seeing him thin and frail in cold, sterile rooms. I didn’t want to watch him pretend to be better than we all knew he was, and so I stopped going. I saw him when he was released. I believed him when he said he was fine. I refused to prepare for a future without him.

When I was twenty, I left the country for the first time on a summer study abroad trip to London that changed my life. I could talk about that trip for ages, but what matters most, in hindsight, was the fact that my mother told me to visit my grandfather in the hospital before I left. I was naive and scared, and my grandfather seemed invincible to me, even with all his hospital stays. I could see that he was aging, but I refused to understand what that meant. My mother knew what I didn’t though, and she was adamant that I say goodbye; six weeks was the longest he and I had ever gone without seeing one another.

And so we stopped off on the way to the airport.

I’ll spare you the details of that visit because I cried during, I cried after, and when I think about it nearly two decades later, I still cry.

The next six weeks were lovely - exciting, eye-opening, fast-paced. I came home a different young woman, who was only sometimes pretentious about what little I’d seen of the world.

It was the early-2000s though and the technology was so different! I brought a cd player with me on the trip and played nothing but early 00’s pop and R&B. I listened to the actual radio and I think I fell in love with Joss Stone’s debut record of mostly covers, The Soul Sessions, like a month before the rest of the US. And while I did have a cellphone, my Metro PCS phone didn’t work in every US state, so it definitely didn’t make the trip across the Atlantic with me. When I wanted to call home, which I did at least once a week, it was always late in the night. My friends and I would go out to the bars to drink (legally!) and then we’d queue (lol) outside of a phone box across the street from our dorms in Russell Square, pull out our international calling cards, and phone home. Every time I called, I asked after my grandfather, and received confirmation that he was fine.

In reality, he was dead. My grandfather, Mr. Lee as I called him in this post, died just a few hours after I saw him. I was probably somewhere over the Southwest when he let go. If I was sentimental, I would think he was waiting to see me one more time so I could say goodbye. And just to be clear, I am deeply sentimental. I had twenty years with my grandfather and they were great, but losing him made grief real to me for the first time.

Since then, there’s only ever been one before and after for me.

My grandfather with my niece, the second to last great grandchild he would see into the world. She is named after me and her younger sister is named after him.

If you made it this far, I want to tell you why I decided to crack my heart open to tell you these things. I write about grief a lot in my books because I think about grief a lot. Like many of you, I live with it, it shapes my days - some more than others and in different ways each time.

Some days I stay in bed and cry, wondering how life might be different if I’d had just one more year with my grandfather. But some days, I hear a song and I sing along off-key like we used to, or get a flash of a memory of his big, bony hand resting on the vibrating gear shift of his tan Ford truck and I smile, or run into a two dollar bill and know he’s with me. Some days, my grief brings me low, but most days it’s that same warm balm from childhood. Lots of people run from grief and I get it, boy do I get it. For years after my grandfather’s death, I would cry for “no reason” and at the drop of a hat. It’s gotten better, but it’s never really gone away. But my grief isn’t good or bad, it’s not either/or, it’s everything. The grief is how I remember sitting at my (not really) cousin Tracy’s wedding with my grandfather, waiting for the sun to set so the ceremony could start and we could eat, joking with him about our hunger. The grief is how I remember feeling seen and safe. The grief is how I love him still.

I write about grief all the time because so many of us live with it all the time, but I specifically write about it in the Bay Area Blues series, because I want to. That series is set in my hometown because grief reminds me of home, but so do loss and laughter and love. I write about people living with grief because many of us do live with grief. It might take us low and change the way we see the world, but we still see it. We still love those we lost and if we’re lucky, we love new people too.

If you’ve read BACK IN THE DAY or LAYOVER or even THE TENANT bits and pieces of my family history might sound familiar to you, because if writers should write what we know, friends I had a PhD in grief long before I got the doctorate in History.

A few days ago I uncomfortably and then unhappily and then angrily watched as people in the romance community suggested that a death in a book negated the forty years of a happily ever after that preceded it.

It does not.

If it did, then I assume my grandfather might have told me something other than how much I looked like my grandmother one of the last times I saw him. If death ended love, I think the relieved look in my grandfather’s eyes before I flew to London might have meant something less to him and to me. If death erased all that came before, it would have been easier to write this blog post. If death erased all the love that came before it, my brother probably wouldn’t have named his second daughter - the first, but not last, of his children not to know our grandfather - after the man who raised us.

And if death ended love, it probably won’t matter to you that my grandfather asked to be buried next to his son and wife even though they’d died more than two decades before.

I don’t expect or want anyone to be as familiar with grief as I and so many others are. I don’t expect or want people who are triggered by parental death or illness to read the books I’ve written about those subjects. But I do expect and want there to be room in the romance genre for those of us who’ve lost so much and are still living and loving in the after.

kat