My grandparents died in 1988 when I was 9 years old. In many ways, that was the beginning of this project.
My grandparents — my mother’s parents — both died of cancer that fall. My grandmother died first, of lung cancer. Yes, she had smoked most of her life. There is even photographic evidence.
My grandfather died next, of stomach cancer. It was all those strongly pickled and preserved things he ate, I heard my mom muse, several years later.
Even now, despite all the medical advances that unquestionably have been made in cancer care and research since the late 80s, cancer is my bogeyman. Cowering deep inside, somewhere I don’t really dare or care to look, is a terrible fear waiting to be realized about me and everyone I love: “You have cancer.”
It was something like family lore, faintly remembered but mostly forgotten in these intervening decades, that my grandparents died exactly 49 days apart. The period of 49 days is laden with meaning in the Buddhist tradition of mourning and grieving. It’s said that after someone dies, it takes 49 days for them to fully transition and be irrevocably released from this world to wherever they are going next. After 49 days, there is nothing left of their spirit or presence here. They are truly gone.
At the time, I remember overhearing my mom tell other adults in confidential, Chinese tones about his final days in Sentara Hospital. How he would see my no-longer-alive grandmother, his no-longer-alive love of his life. How he called to her, “Take me with you.” How her name was the last thing he uttered before he died.
As I was writing this, I suddenly wondered if time was playing a trick on me. What if it wasn’t really 49 days? What if that was just a poetic approximation?
I found a photo from October 6th, 2013, when I visited the Chuang Yen Monastery in Carmel, New York, where their ashes are now kept together on a hillside memorial terrace. The monastery was having one of its twice yearly memorial services, and by sheer coincidence, it was the twenty-fifth-plus-a-day anniversary of my grandmother’s death. I had only just started to suspect that I was pregnant. My mom would later joke that the chanting of the monks and all their blessings had helped to anchor the speck of life inside me, and I found that a comforting thought.
On the photo of the memorial that seals their hillside compartment, there are the death dates I am looking for: October 5th and November 23rd. I pull up the little calendar at the bottom right-hand corner of my laptop screen, and I count. It takes my breath away. I count again. My grandfather did indeed die exactly, precisely 49 days after my grandmother.
My grandfather was Buddhist. Of course he would have been counting the days. I know that now.
I remember coming home from school that day and seeing a profusion of cars in our driveway. And that’s how I knew, before I’d even stepped in the door, that my grandfather had died. Because no one was at the hospital anymore. Everyone who was still alive was inside the house.
If my grandparents ever had an obituary, I never saw it.
It strikes me as odd now to think of that common turn of phrase that so-and-so “is survived by” relatives. “Survived” implies effort, when to be alive feels like a matter of chance. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that they are the people who, by definition of still being alive, are surviving the loss?
I am surviving the loss. Still. When I turn towards it, sorrow is instantaneous.
My sister and I only found out last year or so that there had even been a funeral service. We were in disbelief. “But where were we?? Why didn’t we go?” “You were at school,” my mom said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t want your school to be disrupted too much. Also, I didn’t want you to be scared of a dead body.” Even now, I still don’t really know. Were there two services? Just one?
She had only been trying to spare us the grief. An impossible task. I now wonder if she was also trying to spare herself. Newly orphaned, she must have been grieving acutely. She must have been exhausted by years of relentless care-taking; my grandparents had lived with us for many years. She must have been trying to handle the thousand things that death scribbles onto a to-do list. Maybe she didn’t know how to grieve, let alone shepherd her young children through the process.
In the process, I never really had the chance to say good-bye. And so, I am still saying good-bye — 49 days stretching into a lifetime in which my grief has reincarnated into a search for an inheritance of stories, my own and those of my family.
The only way I know to keep stories is to write them for someone to receive. With your support, I am writing them here to keep for my children.
This is lovely
Beautiful writing. Thank you for sharing.