I’d stayed up late again. I even documented it. I was happy that I had managed to write two days in a row. I’d honestly thought that the next time I wrote it would be much of the same. What a difference just a few hours make. It wasn’t until 4:30am that I again went to sleep. I was busy being busy. This morning I was awoken by a phone call from my mom. At first I didn’t think much of it. For all I knew it was already mid-afternoon and I had slept the morning away. The phone rang with the distinctive ringtone I have for her, Luther Vandross’s, Here and Now. In typical fashion I answered with my ear plugs in. The sound that came from the phone made no sense at all. I immediately knew something was wrong. My mother sounded labored, delirious, upset. I knew that sound, I remembered it from almost 8 years prior when my Aunt Gloria and my Papa died. I sat up in bed and Kenrick jumped from the bed ready to go and find my mother wherever she was. She sounded frantic. She kept repeating that she couldn’t find her car. It was somewhat nonsensical. My brain couldn’t understand why my mother sounded so bereaved because she couldn’t find her car. But then the words came that I never wanted to hear, the words that pierced like a knife through the confusion, “Mommy is gone!”
I was still coming to, my brain trying to keep up with the conversation, the sounds, the feelings. Nothing made sense, nothing felt real. There was a delay in my tears but they assuredly came as we neared the end of our conversation. My husband rushed back into bed and held me close. He hushed me in a manner similar to how my grandmother, the very one who’d just passed, would when I’d skinned my knee or was upset about something that had hurt me. I immediately wanted to call my grandfather to see how he was doing. I knew the answer but as their only granddaughter and oldest grandchild my thoughts gravitated back to my youth. The image of every night grandma and grandpa going off to bed together played back in my mind. They have shared the same room for the entirety of my life. And here I was, in that moment, thinking of what he would certainly feel when this dreadful day was done. I’d seen them together just two months ago as we all celebrated the wedding of their middle grandchild. There were even plans for her to come and visit this year. It was to have been a truly wonderful Thanksgiving with a big part of my Jamaican family here with us during the holiday. But that, as my mother said, wasn’t meant to be. Continue reading “Uncomfortably Numb: The Loss of My Grandma”
LaToya M. Davidson-Perez 