Margarita Mikhailovna, or Babusia, as we all called her, was my last remaining grandparent. She passed away last week at the age of 90. My cousin was supposed to help Babusia video chat with me from the hospital, but it was too late. If you think someone may be on their way out — don’t wait. Don’t hesitate. Don’t wonder if “now is a good time.” Just reach out.
Grief sucks in the best of times, but grief during lockdown has its own nature, it turns out. It’s this muffled and colorless thing. You’re already mourning the old routines and plans you had, and while logically you know that the world is all exits and entrances, when a door opens and someone you dearly love disappears behind it, at a time when it’s so hard to share the very physical, very raw sense of loss, the sky looks as though it’s raining ash.
I remember Babusia as having two kinds of laughter. There was her regular kind, and the kind of mischievous, slightly nasal, and completely disarming “hm hm hm” sound she made when she was sharing an inside joke with you. She was a WWII survivor, her life full of traumas I could never quite wrap my mind around — I imagine it would be like a hamster trying to wrap her mind around the distance between Sun and Earth, or something equally as unfathomable — and as far as her political views, we couldn’t have been more different. And yet there it is, that happy little “hm hm hm,” in my head, every day now.
The fundamental truth of this pandemic is that it has left many of us simply alone with ourselves, with our choices, wrong or right or tantalizingly gray, with our pasts. Grief, as I mentioned, is physical, the mind hammers the body, the body tries to shrink away and can’t, and in regular days, one can let the world shoulder that burden just a little, but the world is segmented down right now.
The air in all of our houses is especially thick with ghosts these days, I imagine. Especially since people are losing loved ones every day.
What to do? I’m lucky enough to be able to Zoom with a therapist and go on runs. Babusia loved spring, and it’s fitting she left us during this season of rebirth. She loved flowers and she would have loved the flowers growing in my neighborhood, messy with rain. She would have loved the mourning doves and evening skies like oyster shells. Unable to fully share my grief with the rest of my family, I dedicate the beautiful things I see to her.
As mentioned in this Twitter thread, I have also found the experience of watching Babusia’s funeral on video chat to be incredibly cathartic:
https://twitter.com/NataliaAntonova/status/1253717321643933697
The truth is, the world is completely upside down. And leaning in to the upside down nature of things can be helpful. The service was in a parking lot because the chapel closed? Great! Some birds and a cute cat were in attendance? Wonderful. My uncle decided to get artistic and showed me the sky above the grave and the tree leaning over it? Even better! People say that video chat can make everything seem unreal, but in my case, it made it more real than anything. It made it into a cogent narrative.
Living through history means riding strangeness out like a wave. It can be dark and foreboding, it can flatten you. And yet some waves crest beautifully, full of sunlight. I don’t know when any of us are going to find our footing again, but I do know that Babusia, having given me many gifts throughout my life, has now given me another one: the gift of taking the ride. Of breathless, luminous acceptance.
I may have said goodbye to her the day of the funeral, but in many ways, I am saying hello — over and over and over again. Because people like her knew what’s up. They knew what it was like to emerge on the other side of darkness.
I think of her as she was, a radiant woman, grievously wounded, yet not defeated by the world. Until her last hours she had retained her laughter, the grain of mischief in her voice. It gives me some hope for the future.
If she could do it, so can we.
Image credit: USFWS Mountain Prairie