The weight of grief

The night my Lolo Eddie died, I made an excuse that I had to buy a watch just so I could get away from bedside duty. I never felt particularly close to him or any of my maternal relatives because I did not grow up around them.

In fact, I always called him the “Other Lolo.”

Unlike my paternal grandfather, I didn’t spend my formative years with Lolo Eddie. I didn’t get to visit him often and I knew very little of him. To me, he was this imposing man with broad shoulders, a stoic face, and a squared jaw that never accommodated a smile. Everyone told me he and I have the same eyes, but other than that, I barely felt a connection with him.

Before I left his hospital room that night, he offered me some money to buy the watch. I took up the offer—it was a rare occasion as he was usually aloof. He even smiled at me as I walked out of the door. It was the first time he smiled at me and the last time I saw him alive.

Thirty minutes later, as I was perusing the plethora of watches in a mall five minutes away from the hospital, my mother called me and all she said was, “He’s gone.” I stayed on the phone with her for a few more seconds, saying nothing until I finally heard the beep as the call ended.

I sort of felt sad, but it was the obligatory kind, the way I would be sad because I knew the person who died, but there was no great sigh, no great shift in my life like the way people describe loss in movies. I didn’t feel the world crashing on me or my knees giving way underneath me.

Instead of rushing back to the hospital, I went on to buy the very next watch my eyes landed on and paid for it with my grandfather’s money.

The next few hours were a blur. I started getting phone calls and texts as news of my grandfather’s death spread from relative to relative. Wherever I went, people offered their sympathy. Some people patted me on the back for “holding up so well”—not knowing that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t mourn for him. Perhaps, it was because I barely knew him.

At least, this was what I told myself.

The thing was, I didn’t want to think about him. I didn’t want to think of how he smiled at me for the first and last time. His affection was something I never experienced—there’s no use yearning for something I never had in the first place.

Forty days after his death, my grandmother decided to put the last of my grandfather’s things away. I helped her sort out his stuff—labeling which ones to be thrown out, which ones to be given away, and which ones to be packed up in boxes.

By mid-afternoon, I was almost through. As I finished labeling my grandfather’s possessions, my grandmother offered me to stay for afternoon merienda. She brought out two cups and poured hot cocoa from a thermos. As she sat next to me, I noticed that she had been crying.

We drank from our cups in silence.

After a while, she asked me if I remembered that summer when I fell from a tree and broke my collarbone. Of course, I remember that day. I fervently swallowed my cries as Lolo Eddie put a splint on my shoulder before going to the hospital. It was the first and only summer I stayed with them.

“Crying won’t make it hurt less,” I said in a deep voice, imitating my grandfather.

My grandmother laughed a little, one that didn’t reach her eyes. Her eyes now constantly carried grief that had been there since Lolo Eddie’s death, although the grief now was subtler—but it was there. I wondered how she was faring between grief and getting by.

“You’re his favorite apo,” she said, her voice cracking. “He just didn’t know how to say he loved you. You know, in the hospital room, he wanted you to stay.”

I stared at the watch that perched on my wrist as Lolo Eddie’s smiling face flashed in my mind. He had reached out to me that day, even in his little way. He tried to reach out to me and I didn’t reach back to him. Instead, I ditched him the moment I had the chance.

I didn’t know what it was, but something broke in me. It felt like a zipper on my skin snapped open and I couldn’t close it back no matter how I tried to. I held onto my grandmother the way I held my body for so long. Then, something wet fell on my cheeks and I realized I was crying for the first time since Lolo Eddie died.

I didn’t know what I was crying for: all the chances I could’ve had with him or all the things I didn’t say. I didn’t know if my grief even matters now.

Suddenly, the watch sitting on my wrist felt heavier than it was.

I wondered if this was the weight of grief, and I wondered—why now?

I could wonder forever and I knew I wouldn’t get answers.

So, there I sat crying, in the middle of my grandmother’s kitchen, my knees finally buckling at the weight of grief that took so long to find me.

Ava Arnejo, 26, is a writer and climate advocate living in Sogod, Cebu.