NFL
By: Brock Vierra
Grief is an odd thing. Grief is a fickle thing to experience. This week marks a month since my grandmother passed away. Having fought cancer for eight years, at 82 years of age, she drew her last breath before venturing onto the great unknown. I have written about grief over the past twelve months. It seems that almost every month I get a call from my mother, informing me of another distant relative meeting their maker but this call made on a Friday hurt a little more. Thus the grieving process begins.
Saying goodbye to her was one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do. Her body, on display in her house, was surrounded by family and love. The family, distant, came together for this singular event. And now she’s gone and the reality of that sinks in. Tears flowed, and oxygen seemed not to be present. In the house once full of life sat death and it was suffocating. Only the fresh air of the Sierra Nevadas gave me the breath that was brisky taken from me.
In the following days, time has eased the pain of an event years in motion. We all knew this day was here. Grandma was bedridden and weak in the final weeks. I witnessed the surge and watched her eat her final meal. A chili dog with a side of rice. A woman born on the homestead, perhaps it was the simplicity of the meal that brought her peace in the end. I don’t know. She couldn’t speak as well. She was the shell of the woman I once knew.
The woman who would chop vegetables days after a hip replacement, the woman who would drive eight hours to and from northern California every weekend to see family, the woman who would get mad at you for buying the expensive canned tuna while simultaneously buying an investment property, that woman was not the woman my Grandma was in the end. Oh, and the price difference in the tuna was 10 cents.
Since her passing, time also gave me a gift. A beautiful stroll down memory lane. Speaking with my significant other, my grandmother’s memory seems to arise in conversation more times than not. A quick remembrance or a full-blown story about an adventure taken years before, in this time of mourning, I’ve found the beauty of grief. I’ve been gifted the memories forgotten, the ability for a final step back in time when it was just my Grandmother and I. The adventures we’d taken, the freedoms she gifted me. The spoiling of a grandparent, the unique moments of the human experience.
So many lost moments have now become known incidences. The time a family member returned her rental car on empty so her and I navigated the unlit road that leads from the homesteads above O’pae’kaa Falls to downtown Kapa’a for gas and to buy food at the local grocery store at three in the morning or her buying me McDonalds late at night because I wanted French fries. She was one of those who would get fries and then complain that they weren’t hot enough even if they were. A lady who broke her collarbone at 81 and with a hip replacement, decided to buy a Ram truck. That’s my grandma.
And I will miss her. She’s the type of woman that you spend your whole life missing. There will always be another story and she will never be forgotten as her life gets retold through the conversations of the next generation. Her life, so rich and so bizarre gets to be displayed in the spotlight she always found a way to find. To you Grandma, I say Ah Hui Ho or until we meet again. I’ll love you forever.
For more conversations, watch The Hot Seat below.
