A Recording of Grief

August 16, 2008

Day 1

It’s still hard to believe that she’s gone. It’s actually almost as if she isn’t. It’s just quiet. Quiet like it’s never been. I can hear the sound of the fan, buzzing in my ear. There’s a knot in my stomach the size of Texas.
My grandmother, Lucille Gonzales, died last night at 10:45 pm of Hepatocellular Carcinoma, a type of cancer. In a way, I was more sad when she was alive than now that she’s passed on. I know that sounds horrible, but it’s true. Well, only when she was alive with this cancer inside of her. It was sadder to see her in pain than to see her free of pain and in a better place, if you believe in that, and I do.
It was hard watching family members cry. We’re normally such a very loud and playful family, but the silence that was in the room after she passed was deafening. One half of the head of the family had passed. Aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, cousins, sons and daughters; they all cried. Not me, I knew that now she was no longer in any pain.
But I fear for my mother, my grandmother’s eldest child. She’s gone through a lot. In the past ten years, she lost a sister, now a mother and a son. When my brother died, something inside of her broke. She was never quite the same person. I fear that now that she has lost her mother, she will go even deeper into herself.
She always keeps everything bottled up inside and it scares me. She ends up going into deep depression. Then, she doesn’t want to do anything. She doesn’t want to see anyone. She doesn’t even want to talk to anyone.
I guess, most of all, I worry about my parents’ marriage. They tend to fight a lot when it comes to this stuff. My father always insists on trying to push her to talk about what she’s feeling and it only makes things worse. I try and tell him, but he doesn’t listen to me.
Well, maybe I lied about what scares me the most because what scares me the most is that, I am almost exactly like my mother. Will what happened to her, happen to me if someone I love deeply passes on. I don’t want to be like that. I know it seems selfish to say this, but all she does when she goes into that state of mind is hurt the people around her and the people she loves. Or at least, it hurts me. I wouldn’t want to do that to the people I love.

-Andrew L. Herrera