Time Left My Feelings Behind: Coping With Grief

On grief, stoplight ambushes, and the sister who remembered everything I forgot

My sister has been dead for three months and I am still catching up to that sentence.

Three months. Ninety-some days in which the calendar has moved forward with its usual indifference, turning pages, advancing numbers, rotating through the weeks the way it does for everyone – the grieving and the ungrieving alike, the living and whatever I am currently doing, which is living in the approximate sense only. The earth tilted and turned. February happened. March happened. And now it is April, and I am still standing somewhere in January with my coat on, waiting for my feelings to catch up to the fact that June is gone.

They have not caught up. I am not sure they know they are supposed to.

This is what no one tells you about coping with grief: it does not travel at the same speed as time. Time is efficient, unsentimental, keeping its appointments with the precision of something that has never loved anyone. Grief is slower. Grief is the passenger who missed the train and is now running down the platform, coat flapping, reaching for a door that is already closed. Time does not wait. Time does not look back. Time is already at the next station, and grief is still on the platform, slightly out of breath, wondering how this happened.

I cry at stoplights.

Not at the expected moments, not so much at the funeral, not in the first raw hours, not in the ways that grief is supposed to present itself, with warning, with occasion, with the decency to arrive when you are already sitting down. No. Grief ambushes me at red lights. It finds me in the Tuesday afternoon ordinariness of a car stopped at an intersection, NPR murmuring something about a world that is continuing without my permission, and then a memory arrives, not gently, not with a knock, but sideways, the way a wave takes you when you’ve turned your back to the ocean. And suddenly I am not at a stoplight in Indianapolis in April. I am somewhere in our shared history, with June, in the particular warmth of being known by someone who knew everything.

June was the master rememberer.

I need you to understand what I mean by that, because it is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the thing. June remembered the dates. She remembered the anniversaries and the birthdays and the unremarkable Tuesdays that had become remarkable because of what happened on them. She remembered what I was wearing the day our mother came home from the hospital after the first stroke. She remembered what song was playing the day our father got his diagnosis. She remembered the names of people I had long since let go, the details of conversations I had summarized into impressions, the exact words spoken in moments I could only recall in approximate form. She was the archive. She was the living record of a life I could not have reconstructed without her.

And now I am trying to remember alone. And I keep reaching for the phone to ask her: June, what year was that? June, do you remember the name of the woman who… June, was it before or after… and then I remember. And the stoplight is very red and the car behind me is waiting and I am somewhere between here and January, between now and then, between the woman I was before I lost my rememberer and whatever I am becoming in her absence.

Today is April 2nd.

My mother died on April 2nd. I know this the way I know my own name, not because I have to look it up but because it lives in my body, encoded in the calendar of grief that runs alongside the calendar everyone else follows. Every year, April 2nd arrives and I feel it before I see it on my phone. My body knows.

And March 20th. My father. Eleven days ago, March 20th came and went and I moved through it the way you move through water – with more resistance than air, with the particular heaviness of a day that carries more weight than its number suggests.

This year I found myself thinking, mid-March, mid-grief, in a thought so strange I could not locate its beginning: what are they doing right now? Not in a theological sense. Not asking about heaven or the afterlife or any framework I have for what follows this. Something simpler and more bewildering than that. Something closer to: does time matter where they are? Is my father aware that it is March 20th? Does my mother know that April 2nd is coming? Are they counting the days the way I am counting them, or have they stepped outside of counting entirely, into something that has no date, no anniversary, no before or after?

I was trapped in that thought for a long time. Long enough that it stopped feeling strange and started feeling like the most reasonable question I had ever asked.

And then I thought: June would know what to do with this. And she would truly care about my new sour dough starter. Fermenting away like the DNA dance we were invited to long ago.

June would have called me on March 20th. She would have called on April 2nd. She would have said something that was half irreverent and half sacred, the way she always held those two things together without effort, and it would have cut through the fog of the question and landed me back in my body. She had that gift. She could locate me when I was lost inside my own mind. She was the GPS of my emotional life, recalculating when I went off road, speaking in that particular voice that said: I know where you are, even when you don’t. Come this way.

But June is the reason I am lost. And she is not here to find me.

Grief is sneaky. I want to say that plainly, the way a warning label says it, the way someone who survived it and came back would say it to the person who is about to go in: grief is sneaky and it does not announce itself and it will find you at the stoplight and in the grocery store and in the middle of a sentence you thought was about something else entirely. It will find you in the word ‘sister’ embedded in an article you are reading on your phone. It will find you in the smell of something she would have cooked. It will find you in a song lyric that was never about her until it was about nothing else. It will find you in the silence where her phone call should be on the days that have always had her call in them.

I thought I knew grief. I have lost my parents. I have lost a life I built, a daughter I loved past reason, a version of myself I cannot entirely recover. I thought I had apprenticed under grief long enough to know its rhythms, its ambush points, its preferred hours. I thought I had, if not mastered it, at least mapped it.

June’s grief has unmapped everything.

Because June was my witness. Not just my sister, though she was that, six years younger, the pink baby they brought home, the first thing I ever loved that was entirely new. She was my witness. She was the person who had been present for the things that formed me, who carried corroborating evidence of my own life, who could be called upon when memory grew uncertain to say: yes, that happened, I was there, here is how it went. Losing June is not like losing a person. It is like losing the confirmation that I exist in the way I remember existing. It is like having the receipts of your own life burned.

I am fuzzy, now, in a way I have never been before. Not confused exactly. Not unable to function. But fuzzy at the edges, the way a photograph goes when the subject has moved slightly and the camera did not track the movement fast enough. I am the camera. Time is moving. And I am catching the blur of where June was a moment ago, not where she is.

Here is what I know about time, from standing inside grief while time keeps going:

Time is not the healer. Time is the medium in which healing either happens or it doesn’t. Time passes regardless. The question is what you are doing inside it. And what I am doing inside it, three months into the absence of the person who remembered everything, is this: I am learning to be my own archive. I am learning to hold the dates myself. To feel March 20th in my body and call it by its name. To arrive at April 2nd and say: today is the day my mother left. To hold these dates without June holding them alongside me, which is harder than I expected and more important than I can fully articulate.

Because someone has to remember. That is what I learned from June and what June learned from our mother and what our mother learned from her mother before her and what all the women in this line of rememberers learned from the women before them: someone has to remember. Someone has to carry the dates and the names and the details and the exact words spoken in the moments that matter. Someone has to be the archive. Someone has to be the living record.

June did it for me. Now I do it for June. I hold the dates she would have held. I remember the things she remembered for me, or try to, or write them down when my memory proves unequal to the task. I say her name on the days that would have had her calling. I carry her the way she carried me, not perfectly, not without forgetting, not without the ache of inadequacy that comes from trying to be something you were never designed to be alone.

But I carry her. Because she carried me. And because time is going to keep moving whether I catch up to it or not, and I would rather move through it with June in my arms than stand on the platform watching it go.

It is April 2nd.

My mother died on this day. My sister is three months gone. My father has been gone since a March 20th that is now one of many. And I am sitting inside all of this, fuzzy at the edges, catching up slowly, crying at stoplights where no one can see me and everyone is waiting for the light to change.

The light always changes. That is the thing about stoplights. You can be devastated at one and fine at the next, not because the devastation has passed but because the light changed and your foot moved and the car moved and time moved, as it always does, without asking you if you were ready.

I am not ready. I was not ready for March 20th and I am not ready for April 2nd and I was not ready for January when June left, and I have come to understand that readiness is not the condition under which grief arrives. Grief does not wait for readiness. Grief arrives at the stoplight, in the grocery store, in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, in the word ‘sister’ in a sentence about something else entirely.

And you feel it. And the light changes. And you go.

That is what survival looks like from the inside, in the months that time has left your feelings behind. You feel it. And the light changes. And you go.

If you are navigating your own timeline of loss, let’s talk.