When I was 20, I saw my grandmother cry for the first time. It was a heartbreaking, indescribable feeling. I had come home from university to a call saying that my great-grandmother had passed. As soon as I arrived home, I sat right beside my grandma in our living room.
“Lidu, enate hedechibign,” she said to me as if I were a stranger she met at a bus stop — “my mom is gone.”
In the flood of emotions, I remember thinking to myself how in that moment the woman who I saw as my gracefully glamorous grandma was not my grandma but a daughter.
This thought came over me randomly this past week while I was admiring an image of her. It sparked the thought of how the people in my life are many different people outside of who I know them to be. My aunt is a sister. My sister is a mom. My mom was once a 25-year-old woman figuring things out. It makes me wonder about the different people others see in me. I’m no mother or grandmother, but I am a sister, a friend, a lover, and just as I am a 25-year old who’s not sure where her life is headed, I am also that 13-year old who was playing the Parachutes album while staring dramatically out of my mom’s car window.
Not to say that people solely define who and what we are. I believe that we have the power to decide that, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that who and what we are is so much more than we think. How limiting of me to only think of my grandmother as my grandmother. She is way more nuanced, well-lived, complex, and frankly too fabulous for that. She has lived in completely different countries, met interesting people, bore immense grief yet loved deeply…
If you’ve taken nothing from reading this so far, I’d ask that you take this one thing with you. When you look at a friend or neighbor, I invite you to ask yourself who they are, who they were, and who they might be.
It was the summer evening of 2007. My mother, Bete, and aunt, Mimi, had just gotten off of work from their 9 AM to 7 PM shift. Like most days, I had spent the whole day playing with my cousins at our home in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Nothing was complicated then. Times were much simpler. My seven-year-old self had no stress, no worries; just juice boxes and bliss.
We had spent the day with my maternal great-grandmother, Emaye. Yes, I said great-grandmother. Little me did not understand how much of a blessing that was. How many people don’t even have the opportunity to be raised by a grandparent. To hear their stories. To absorb their wisdom. To feel their love. And although I am, obviously, no grandparent of my own, I would like to imagine it as a surreal experience.
There was a routine. Emaye would have spent the afternoon preparing dinner for the family, one of the earliest acts of love that I learned from her. She understood the difficulty that came with raising children as a single working mother. Her circumstances were more traditionally Ethiopian, but, nonetheless, she understood.
Mimi would first finish showering her day away and join the family downstairs to greet us. Bete would have followed in her footsteps: shower the day’s hardships away, come downstairs, and greet us as if her world wasn’t crumbling. I had always admired that about her, her ability to find a reason to smile, even when she lived in a world that prevented her from doing so.
“Eshi, endet walsh?” Bete said to Emaye: "So, how was your day?"
“It was great, praise be to Him.” Emaye said passionately in Amharic and proceeded with, “Mimi, prepare the table for dinner.”
Earnestly, Mimi takes out a large, round flowery tray and places the food on top of it. The malleable injera is placed on the magical Thai flowers. Next, using the heated silver spoons, she pours various types of wot all around the plate: dinich wot (potato stew), siga wot (a thick, beef stew), as well as shiro (a chickpea stew). I assure you these foods taste better than they sound. Still, the aroma of the seasoned stews, fills the room causing the sounds of rumbling stomachs to grow louder.
To this day, the scents that filled the room remind me of something deeper - of warmth, of family, of home.
By this time, I had returned from the kitchen to my younger cousins, Beti and Sabel. We played a game that probably made no sense to anyone else besides us, but it was ours. We used our innocently wild imaginations to create it. We were creators! All of a sudden, we become interrupted by the gently potent voice of my mother.
“Lidya!” said Bete.
I, completely bummed that I was taken away from this microcosm, slowly dragged my feet towards the adults.
“Abet?” I said in an irritated manner which translates as “Yes?”
Since I was the oldest out of my cousins, I was the one who was often inquired about how our day went, and usually, I never had a problem with sharing this information. However, my attitude this evening was on a different level. I was just in the middle of telling Beti about my future plans for my baby (the doll) when I was interrupted. The future of my baby was now gone (I forgot my idea). And this, oh, this made me upset.
“Are you hungry?” Mimi asked with a concerned look.
“No.” I said in a hurried manner.
I had still felt the weight of the graham crackers and apple juice I had eaten about an hour ago present in my stomach.
“Enchi, gursha!” Emaye said with a pure look and holding out her hand: "Here, take a bite!"
“NO!” I said in an extremely rude voice and stormed away.
Bete and Mimi were staring at me wide-eyed appalled. You would think that I had done something extremely horrific. I was genuinely confused as to why they both looked at me that way. Bete was reaching for her shoe to throw at me when Emaye stopped her from doing so. I, for one, took this as permission to walk back to my unaware cousins to continue on with our shenanigans. When doing so, I turned towards Emaye and my little heart dropped. Her eyes were filled with both hurt and disappointment, suddenly, a sense of guilt overwhelmed me.
I had tried to shake off the guilt, but it seemed impossible. Why was what I did wrong? I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Does Emaye hate me? It was just food.
These answers did not come to me until writing this.
You see, a gursha is more than just taking a bite from someone. It is a gift. In our culture, it is a means of sharing one’s love, trust, and blessings to another. That is why saying “no” to Emaye was a big deal. It was a representation of me rejecting these things. Rejecting these gifts. Rejecting my culture.
Here
Life is full of loss. I know what you are thinking. Lidya, what a pessimistic way of starting off your statement, but it is true. Loss is and has always been everywhere. It may have appeared more heightened in the past year, but it has always existed. We lose people. We lose homes. We lose our identities. We lose, what I believe to be the greatest loss of all, ourselves. But with every loss comes a gain.
Summer of 2020 was probably the most traumatic summer I have ever experienced. My mother had lost her job leaving her subject to even more on her plate, and my great-grandmother, Emaye, had fallen extremely ill leaving me and the rest of my family to care for her. In the beginning, we were seeing her health progress which served as one of the few encouragements in the already disappointing COVID-19 world.
“What a blessing it is,” I continuously thought to myself, “to be able to experience a great-grandmother!”
Yet, one of the few goods I had completely flipped. Emaye had fallen terribly ill, once again, harder than the first time, and there was not much we could do. On top of that, I had to return back to college leaving my mother and my aunt alone to take care of her. The amount of guilt I felt coming back to college was immense. My mind was constantly fighting itself causing me to enter a state of deep depression. Little did I know that the last conversation with Emaye I had before going back to university was the last goodbye. I was completely torn when I received a call on that rainy Tuesday of September. I still remember it to this day.
“Lidya, she’s gone.” my cousin Bety mumbles numbly.
Quite frankly, I still cannot explain to you what I felt after hearing that. I mean, I knew that her time was approaching soon, but I was still in utter shock. This became one of the worst losses I had experienced up to this point in my life, and trust me, I have unfortunately experienced a lot of loss. To me, it was deeper than just losing a loved one. It felt like I lost a piece of my culture, my identity, myself. All of her experiences and sufferings buried away like they never happened. It also stirred in me a troubling feeling that loss was inevitable. Soon enough, it would or could be my mother, father, brother, friend, or, even, me and there was no way to stop it. I felt lost, hopeless, numb—nothing.
You can probably imagine how horribly my semester went. I could never sleep properly. I barely ate. Missed several of my classes. Often missed work, whom I’m thankful didn’t fire me. I found myself constantly in my room, alone. I would try to be around friends but even that was draining what was barely there. I had become a physical representation of what letting yourself go was. My hair was shedding away along with the light I once had. My eyes had lost the youthful ability to see good.
I found myself in an emotional abyss that I could never get out of. Life was dark, hopeless. I felt like a ghost shapelessly roaming through the days. I found myself thinking about death often while living. At a certain point, I was convinced I was. Although I am the queen of existential crises, life had never made the least amount of sense to me. Everything felt pointless. Being around people—pointless. Eating—pointless. Getting out of bed—pointless. What was the use of doing anything anymore if we are all going to end up buried under the ground someday? None of this shit will matter. Attending my research class in the middle of a pandemic will not matter. I did not matter.
There would be days when all I did was cry. There were times when I had no energy to cry.
Still, I can picture myself. Alone. In a dark room. Staring at the walls.
The lights were always low because I didn’t want to see how low I had been. It is one thing to know you aren’t doing well, but genuinely seeing yourself solidifies what loss does to you. And along with this the comments people say truly digs the knife initially placed into you deeper.
“You look tired!” MF, I AM!
“Come with us to...?” NO!
“Wow, you lost weight! You must be working out ” THE ONLY THING BEING WORKED IS MY WILL TO LIVE.
Yet, I would send a nod or fake chuckle to assure them of their remarks. It was either that or me beating their ass while sobbing, and that, unfortunately, is deemed as socially unacceptable.
Well when did it get better? The truth is it didn’t. It doesn’t. I got through that semester, year, with no ambition or drive to accomplish anything.
I wrote the beginning of this for a scholarship essay to study abroad which I ended up getting. It is crazy to see how trauma sells. Corporations and foundations have stacked away millions of dollars worth of scholarship for the lucky winner of who has the best sob story. Who can make me feel the most sympathy while simultaneously making me feel better about myself. There were several versions of this essay. I had to tweak my experience to make it more palatable to others. Make it sad, but not too depressing. Make it real, while taking out the truth. Make me understand you, but in a way that makes sense to me. People claim they want the truth but are uncomfortable with it. Well, frankly, I don’t give a fuck anymore.
The truth is loss will never not fuck you up. People say that it gets better, and I never understood what it meant until now. Loss is a huge weight that you have to carry around with you, and it’s not something that necessarily goes away (the people that say it does are lying). You will feel its impact on your ability to move and be I can guarantee that, but it won’t feel as heavy as it once used to. The more you carry it, feel it, sit with it, the less you become shocked the weight exists.
In fact, one day you’ll find yourself sobbing on a Thursday afternoon wondering if something is genuinely wrong with you and as you do a yellow butterfly comes to sit on your tear-stained hands. And despite your runny nose and puffy eyes, you manage to crack open a little smile. What you’re smiling about you aren’t exactly sure? Is it that the butterfly is kind of the cutest creature you’ve ever seen? Is it the fact that you’re sobbing on a park bench by yourself when normal people are at their office jobs? You’re not really sure, yet you find yourself thinking about this specific moment in time. You are shocked how someone can feel an immeasurable amount of pain and still, without their control, find a reason to smile about something. You take a deep breath in, breathing in every little oddity about this moment. Your mind goes blank for a second as you are only focused on being. As you exhale slowly, you feel an ease as the intensity fades away as you share it with your surroundings, including that little butterfly. You know that it’ll come back again, the hurt, the weight, the loss, yet you find a way to keep going.
Where? I’m not exactly sure. I just know that I’m fine with being here.