Mercy Thomas
Fact #1
There are seven stages of grief (West).
1. Shock
2. Denial
3. Anger
4. Bargaining
5. Depression
6. Testing
7. Acceptance
August 2016
My grandmother was diagnosed in 2016 with cancer for the fourth time. My parents had just come home from their anniversary trip in Hawaii when the phone rang from our bright yellow kitchen wall. My mother sat us down on our ugly green couches to tell us the news. There was a mist in my father’s eyes as he explained that they didn’t know what it was, just that it was moving fast. Stage three, or maybe stage four. I didn’t know much about cancer, but I did know it didn’t go past stage four.
Flowers
We’re deadheading them—
They won’t survive the winter freeze
She tells the students as they pass
bouquets in hand they walk to class.
And I paused in the library doorway,
wishing I had time for flowers
wishing I had someone to give flowers to wishing flowers could bloom in the snow that
I knew was coming.
Fact #2
A study by Benjamin Oosterhoff shows that 28% of people experience their first sudden loss between ages thirteen and eighteen. He remarks that a smaller portion of people (13%) experience their first death prior to age thirteen. At your eighteenth birthday party, less than half of your friends have experienced death at all.
November 2016
At first they thought it was pancreatic, but doctors can make mistakes. When I was younger, I thought that chemo was where they put you into a big humming machine and blasted you with invisible radiation until your hair fell out. It turns out that chemotherapy is just an IV, or pills that come in mismatched colors.
For three months we made the six-hour drive to New Mexico every other weekend to visit my grandmother. My father stacked us in the car like Jenga blocks, pressed the pedal to the metal, and hurtled down the interstate until our jagged blue mountains faded to soft gray mesas.
I remember my mom announcing that my grandmother didn’t want to continue with chemo or hospice. I remember feeling like the air in my chest was being sucked out with a drinking straw, leaving me tight and breathless and numb. Did Grandma want to die?
Leaves
Fall leaves like to roll more than they like to fall.
Fall leaves pray for the wind to carry them elsewhere,
beyond roots and fenceposts
beyond dirt and drudgery
beyond branches and cloud coverage
They like to spin and scrape at the sidewalk
kicking up memories and dust
until a whirlwind
funnels them
into
tornadoes.
I like dead leaves best.
They crunch
unlike their livelier counterparts
Fact #3
One hundred and six people die every minute (“World Death Clock”). That’s almost two every second. Thirty-six thousand people died while you were at school today.
December 2016
I switched from praying that she would get better to praying she would pass peacefully. It felt cruel and twisted, but it was all I had left. At twelve I didn’t know what to make of things. I had just started to live when the people around me started to die.
We sat in a crumpled pile on the floor in my parents’ room on New Year’s Day. I didn’t know who was above me, or who was below. I only knew we were all crying, and that my arms were wet from someone else’s tears. Grandma was gone.
The funeral was long. I felt sorry for my cousins who had known her better than I had. I remember singing the strangled notes of “Gethsemane,” and wondering why—if Jesus really did love me—he would let my grandma choose to die. At the luncheon, I smiled for the first time since she passed. I wondered if it was okay to feel happy when my grandfather would be sad for the rest of his life.
Bugs
Amber catches sunlight
Preserves memories and moments and magic
in drops of sappy time
No one wonders how the bees were caught midflight
or when the beetles stopped struggling against their sticky demise
They just marvel at the beauty trapped glistening inside
Fact #4
Mourning typically lasts anywhere from six months to two years. It can take much longer.
December 2020
My ballroom teacher pressed clip-on earrings into my hands five minutes before our first number. I clutched them as I ran down the high school’s hallway in my two-inch heels, frantic to be in full costume before curtain call. It wasn’t until I had put the earrings on and made eye contact with myself in the mirror that I began to cry.
My grandmother wore hoop earrings. I had never looked like her, but I felt like I could see her staring out of my face, smiling at me as if to say, Look Mercy, we match. I could hear the recording my father took of us talking that day in November.
“I have a ballroom concert this weekend. I’m not very good. I’m excited and nervous.” She asked me what I was dancing, who I would be with, if I would have fun. I could almost hear her in the back of my head faintly whispering You’re going to do great! I wiped the mascara from my eyes and shuffled out of the girls’ bathroom.
Dead Things
I love dead things
Dead flowers
Dead leaves
Dead bugs
My dead grandmother.
Their beauty doesn’t come from the state of death
but instead from the knowledge that they were once alive
Their purpose
Their feelings
And thoughts
And the things they once loved
These I Have Loved
all of those things make us hold on tighter
—much, much tighter—to what we know we will lose
I know you stayed as long as you could—
I forgive you grandma.