The Day After

There was always one more task.

Order the flowers. Find something to wear, and jewelry to go with it. Plan out where everyone would meet and when. Practice what I'd say if someone asked how I was doing. Write the post about what she meant to me, and get it right, because I only got to write it once. Answer the condolence calls, texts, and comments.

Then I went to the wake, the funeral, and the reception. I said the things I had practiced saying and caught up with people I hadn’t seen in years. My sister and I had our own private catch-up and a nice dinner.

Now the flowers are done being flowers. The post is published, and people have stopped sending their condolences. The wake and funeral are over. My sister has gone home.

Today there's no list.

And there's nothing left standing between me and the fact that Mary Claire, the woman I called my grandmother, is gone.

I keep thinking about her. Without anything else competing for my attention, the quiet keeps screaming her name.

If you've ever had a week like this, a task for every hour so you didn't have to feel the thing underneath it, I'm not going to tell you it gets easier from here. You got through the list. That's not the same thing as being on the other side of it.

What's happening right now isn't a setback. It isn't you falling apart after holding it together so well. The tasks are gone, that's all. Grief doesn't need a task list to survive. It just needed the room to get quiet enough to be heard.

Everyone treats the list as the hard part.

It isn't. It's what was standing between you and the hard part.

There was always one more task. Now there isn't. The true grief and work begin.