Grief Paints, Too

“Be so very light. Be a gentle whisper.” – Bob Ross

It’s my mother’s birthday. My aunt sent me a text just “4/12/49.” Her only big sister has been gone now for 9 years and neither of us can believe it. I wonder if it is for her the way it works for me sometimes – grief being a painter of memory and rememory.

This year something else clicked into place like a new scene after a burning cue mark in my mind. I have spent what feels like a lifetime saying that my dad died the day before my mom’s birthday. One month after my thirteenth. 4/11 or 411. An information day. But that isn’t true. My dad’s death record says he died on the 10th.

That fact sets an empty canvas in my mind. Grief gets to work. Maybe he died at night. With a happy little tree living outside his hospital window bowing before the April rain. Maybe my mom got the call after I had already gone to bed and decided to take some time to herself. Maybe she called her dear friend Taalibah and they talked for hours about beating the devil out of my dad’s funeral. Maybe she called her sister. Maybe she came to my door and looked in to see if I was really asleep. Maybe she called to me to see and then let my dreams waft through my mind undisturbed. Grief paints a sunrise. My mother’s first sunrise as the single parent of teenage me.

Grief paints her sorrowful but resolute. No mistakes in her love life, just happy accidents. Maybe the 10th bled gently into the 11th and she decided to let me go to school. I don’t remember. Maybe she told me that morning and had me stay home. I remember how healthy her plants looked as she broke the news to me. That seems a rather strange detail now.

Pothos curls flowing down her bookshelves. “Your dad has passed on.” She lights incense in a holder next to one of them. Grief paints the smoke and the swirls of green saying “gotta give him a friend.” She tells me. In my memory. And I freeze. All I can think about is him dying the day before her birthday but during the holy month of Ramadan. Guaranteed paradise for him. Guaranteed closure for her. The next day she would turn forty. And it would take me another 36 years to realize she gave herself the gift of one night before she had to tell me. Grief a masterpiece painter indeed.