Lessons in love and loss
Throughout my life, there has been no shortage of lessons of love: navigating familial love, my first love, platonic love, the love I have for our pets, self-love, and understanding how people love each other.
Most recently, I’ve been trying to understand how love impacts our actions, and how those actions can affect the ones we love.
I lost both my grandparents on the same day. My grandma, Kay, was 89 and my grandpa, Ken, was 91. I knew them as Papa Ken and Granny Kay.
As a journalism student, it was all too ironic that my family learned what had happened from me finding an article online. It was the first time people I loved were listed namelessly as the deceased, and the first time it was my family that was being referred to when it stated “Names will be released pending family notification.” My mom reminded me after I fell into a rabbit hole of reading the breaking news stories of their death that these articles didn’t preserve the human elements and character that I knew and loved about my grandparents.
Papa Ken was an ex-marine and rocket scientist from Missouri who sported a handlebar mustache, a Buddha necklace, and a Hawaiian shirt for all 22 years I knew him.
My Granny Kay was almost 6 feet until the end with a laugh that could bring anyone out of a bad mood and a sense of kindness that brought friends from around the world to visit them.
Together, they built a home filled with four children (Ken, Kristi, Karen, and Kevin), dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, countless parties, and almost 65 years of marriage. Their backyard was the venue of two weddings — one of which was my parent’s — and one funeral. According to my Granny Kay, they were still waiting to have their first argument.
They gave me a childhood full of magic. My Papa Ken built us a tree house with a connecting zip line in the backyard in the branches of a pepper tree. In the treehouse was a mailbox and every morning we stayed at their house, there would be a letter waiting for me, my cousin, and my brother from The Magic Mailman with a scavenger hunt that led us to a special prize. We played games, we read stories, we played with balloon animals and hoola hoops and anything under the sun that could bring our childhood whimsy.
As they crept into old age, the inevitable subject of the end couldn’t be avoided. When it became dangerously close, it was more and more apparent that when it was my grandpa's time to pass, my grandma didn’t want to live without him. At the time, I understood this as a sentiment expressed on the brink of losing the love of her life; said more as an expression of love than an indicator of action. Unfortunately, it was the latter. They loved each other so much that they felt the only way to go down was together.
On paper or as fiction: Tragically romantic. When it was my parents who clutched one another after learning of this tremendous loss: Devastating.
I felt confused and disturbed trying to piece together how this had happened. In an act of love, they had left behind and hurt so many loved ones. I understood the extent of their inseparability and that they felt it was their time, but like so many who lose a loved one to suicide, I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that there could have been more time, more goodbyes, or a more peaceful way for them to leave us.
Soon after, I began to see another side of love. My family grew up without religion. We often celebrated “spring” instead of Easter and Christmas — like many— without the religious aspects (so just a tree and gifts). A couple of days after the loss, a family friend came to the house who had also lost a loved one that week and spoke to my dad about the Jewish tradition of Shiva. Leading up to this conversation, my house was a grief sanctuary for me, my parents, and my brother where we tip-toed around the subject and hardly uttered a word of what had happened to the outside world. But after speaking to our friend, my dad was touched by this tradition and the prospect of healing through vulnerability, so my house and my family opened up to our loved ones who wanted to help.
I had to return back to school only a couple of days after the loss of my grandparents. I was brought back to academics while my family practiced the newly welcomed Shiva. While I wasn't able to experience the tradition firsthand, I had a version of my own through the outstanding kindness of my friends back at school.
It wasn’t without the colossal loss that I experienced the love and support that my community had to offer. My grandparents loved each other in a way that was undeniable to anyone who had the pleasure of knowing them and the devastation of losing them. They adored their family and reminded me every time I saw them in person, wrote to them, or spoke to them on the phone that they loved me and they were proud of me.
I know in many ways it was their time to go, but there were still so many more questions I had to ask them and stories I needed them to tell me for the hundredth time. Love was the force behind their leaving this earth. Love was the force behind the incomparable anguish of losing them. Love was the force behind the food showing up at our door and the arms that wrapped around us in our time of need. Through these times I try to remind myself that even when loved ones are gone, there is an abundance of love. It’s in our actions, our words, and our communities.
