Some Things Travel Faster Than Light

It’s the motherfucking holiday season, y’all. At least that’s what my TV is telling me.

What gets me is that I used to love the holidays, and now I’m a fucking cliché. Now I just furtively get really fucking drunk on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even when I was a kid, and my dad was a complete ass 99% of the time, I still looked forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas, because all his toxicity could be negated by the presence of the rest of my family. Then he stopped coming to Thanksgiving, and then Christmas. For one shining year in my family, the holidays were pleasant and full of love.

That was 2003. Three weeks after Christmas of that year, my Nana (my mom’s mom) was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She was dead by the middle of February. I have come to see this as the turning point for my family, the point at which everything started to fall completely apart.

My Nana was the type of woman who would sit the family down, tell everyone to shut up and deal with whatever problems they had with each other RIGHT NOW, and make everything ok. Since both of my parents worked when I was a child, I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house, as they lived 2 houses down from us. It was wonderful. I loved the days when they picked us up from school instead of my mom, I loved eating family dinners at their house, even though I wasn’t allowed to sit on the one chair I really wanted, a straight-back upholstered number that now resides in my kitchen. I got a lot of her jewelry, and I probably wear a piece every day.

I don’t think I can accurately describe how amazing she was. I loved her very much, and she was and remains the one person in my life who I am certain always loved me, was always proud of me, always accepted me for me. My grandfather, who is still living, is a close second. He only ever asks if I am going to church.

But all of a sudden my family got turned on its head. It was 5 days after my 19th birthday when we found out Nana was sick. At that point, everyone was pretending she was going to get treatment and everything would be fine. I’ll never forget standing in my mom’s living room, talking to my older brother about what was going to happen.

What would happen is that I’d come home from college every weekend for the next six weeks, and watch my Nana change into someone almost unrecognizable as she went through chemo. I remember talking to my mom in the middle of February, on what would turn out to be the day before my Nana died, and all she could really tell me was, “We moved her to Hospice. It won’t be long.”

The next day–it was a Wednesday–my brother came and picked me up from my dorm and we drove the hour and a half to the hospice place. I don’t remember the car ride at all. I don’t remember walking into the hospice center. All I can remember is being in the room with my Nana, my mom, my grampa, my oldest sister and my brother, and waiting for her to go. She was unconscious, so frail as to appear almost inhuman. It feels indecent to describe the scene any further, but suffice it to say that I have an image of her that I have, unfortunately, not been able to rid myself of yet. (In fact, until very recently, that was the only way I could manage to remember her.)

My oldest sister was sitting next to her and was the one to put her head to my Nana’s chest when it seemed she’d stopped breathing. We all said goodbye, and left my grampa alone in the room. That was the only time I heard or saw him cry the whole week. I hate that I saw it. I wish I could forget it.

The rest of the day is a blur. My only clear memory is getting back into my car (my brother had picked me up in it) and driving alone back to my mom’s house. The CD I had in started over, and whether it was somehow fortuitous or simply a coincidence, the first song on that album was exactly what I needed to hear. It was a song about leaving home, about losing some part of you but about always being able to come back and find some part of what you left. Even though everything had changed, I thought it would be ok.

She was cremated, but we still had a casket at her funeral mass, which I have always found weird. I had never been to a funeral before, so I had to go out with my sister-in-law to buy something to wear. I sobbed through the whole funeral, went home and got really fucking drunk with the rest of my family.

Then I had to go back to real life, but nothing has been the same since. I really think that if my Nana was still around, none of the shit that has happened with my family would have ended how it has–with my sister not speaking to any of us. Nana would never have let it happen. My mom would still have her mom. She would have done what I couldn’t, and gotten everyone in a room to talk it out and just grow the fuck up.

I have never shared any of this with anybody, including the 2 therapists I’ve had in the last 4 years. And I’m not sure why I’m thinking of it now, except that when the holidays come around, all I can think about is how my family is a shadow of what it once was, and that I really miss everyone–even my dad.