What the Ground Remembers

THROUGH MY EYES

by Kasia Yoko

There is a particular silence that will settle over our family on the day we stand at his graveside, and I know already it will be nothing like the silence of an empty room. It will be full; full of everything nobody is saying, full of the version of us that existed only weeks ago, before the word "was" replaced the word "is" when we spoke of him. We are counting down to the 8th of August now, the day we lay him in the ground, and the waiting has its own particular ache, grief with a date attached, sorrow you can see coming.

We have brought my father home to Poland, to the resting place of our ancestors, because that is what he would have wanted, and because some part of me believed that returning him to that soil might make the loss make some sense. It hasn't, not yet. Poland is not offering me answers. It is only offering me memory, every street corner, every church bell, every smell of bread from a bakery window, pulling up some earlier version of our family, whole and unbroken, laughing at a table that suddenly feels impossibly far away.

We used to be a unit. All for one and one for all, that was not just a saying in our house, it was the architecture of how we lived. My father was not the only pillar, but he was the one none of us imagined could fall. And in falling, he seems to have taken something structural with him, because now I watch my mother, the woman who held all of us together through every other storm, disappear into a grief so total it frightens me.

Her heart gave out before her spirit did, and now both are healing at a pace I cannot control and cannot rush. She looks at us, her children standing right beside her, and she does not see reasons to keep going. She sees only the absence of him. I have never felt so useless as I do watching someone I love conclude that love isn't enough of a reason to stay. I don't have a tidy resolution to offer you here, because I don't have one for myself yet either. Some days the only honest thing I can write is that this is unbearably hard.

But I want to say this, to her and to anyone reading who is standing where we are standing: death is final for the one who has gone. It does not have to be final for the rest of us. The unity we built as a family did not live inside my father alone, it lived in the way he taught us to show up for one another, and that will still be here, on the 8th of August, in whatever hands we are holding on that day. Grief does not erase what a person built in you. If anything, it is the proof of how much they built.

I don't know yet what our family looks like on the other side of this. I only know that we are still, however unsteadily, a "we." My father will soon be in the ground of our ancestors, but the love that made us a unit will not go into the ground with him. It will still be standing, in Poland, in the people who come to bury him and who will, somehow, keep on living.

That is not nothing. Some days, right now, it is everything I have.