"Memories are the great liars. The gap between what you remember and what you think you remember and what actually happened widens every time you 're-remember' something – perhaps especially if you didn’t think about it much when it first happened, but maybe even if you’ve thought about it all too much. I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother recently. Thinking about how, when she died, I wasn’t prepared, and the very nature of unpreparedness is sometimes enough to distort the memory. I thought she was in the hospital for weeks. My parents [later] said it was days. But that’s what happens with memory. You remember how it really was for you, not necessarily how it really was in reality. So then, maybe I take back what I said. Or at least amend it. Yes, memory is the great liar, but it’s also, perhaps, the great truthteller – the one no one else can yet claim to be."
- Alexis Aulepp (a 5-minute in-class writing, 2/25/20)
GRIEF AND LOSS
Photo courtesy of Alexis & the Aulepp family. Taken March 2006, approximately three months before Alexis' grandma's passing. From left: Alexis (7), Grandma (68)
They say that it takes about seven years for most of the cells in the human body to be replaced. That means that every seven years, you are composed of an almost entirely different set of cells than the ones you were made of seven years previously.
This is how I measure my distance from my grandmother.
If I was eight years old when she passed, and I am nearly twenty-two now, that means that not only have I already become an entirely different person from who I was when I knew her, but I have also become an almost entirely different person from that person.
I wonder, when I remember this, if memories die along with our cells. Or, at the very least, if memories are like the houses we lived in when we were those people. Those houses, I imagine, burn away with each new rolling over of cells; as we leave, we flee with only what we can carry in our arms. But then we gather new belongings, in our new houses, and soon what we can keep carrying of our original loot dwindles down from a suitcase, to a grocery bag, to a wallet.
I pull out my grandmother’s picture and look at it.
Memories, I think, are like water. The kind of water that you find in dreams. Rising in flashes and waves, but you can’t see deeper than the surface. Coming and going in bits and pieces, but not whole. Not smooth. And the picture is hard to assemble. Especially when you wake up and slowly lose hold of everything but the way the sunlight looked, shining on the ocean, no matter how desperately you grasp at the sand.
My memories of my grandmother are few and far between. I remember Barbie Unicorn puzzles on her white kitchen table. Blue nail polish in her favorite salon. Spinning around and around in her living room until the ceiling spun, too. I remember Beanie Baby collections in the closet, and sleepovers in her pink bedroom, and making eggs with cheese for breakfast in what I thought was our own secret recipe. I remember thinking she was one of the best people in the world. I remember thinking I was so lucky to have her.
I remember the day my parents broke the news.
She was dead.
Well, not dead, they said. But not alive.
She was somewhere in between.
I remember coming home to both of my parents standing in the living room. I remember thinking this was odd, thinking that my mother shouldn’t be home for another few hours, and being more confused than elated because their faces told me I should be afraid.
But, try as I might, I don’t remember what is real and what is dream. I remember sitting, my discarded backpack at my side. I remember questions. I remember not enough answers. I don’t remember anything else until the hospital.
I remember being angry. I remember my parents riding the elevator up to a higher floor while I and my younger brother and a family friend waited in the hospital lobby. I remember thinking that rules about not allowing kids in certain parts of the hospital were unfair, no matter how germy or not they may be. I remember not being germy. I remember hating the number twelve because I was eight and if only I had been twelve I could have ridden up that elevator with my parents.
But that’s not true. I don’t think I really hated the number twelve. It’s all so hard to piece together.
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Because I know I never got to say goodbye. Not while she was breathing. Not before they signed the papers and pulled the plug and wheeled her off to wherever they take bodies before they show up in a casket in the lobby of a Catholic church.
I know I got to see her, one last time, before they closed the lid, but everything felt like a dream that day.
And yet…
That was the realest part. Sitting in a chair (or a pew), crying silently until someone next to me told me something I no longer remember, then crying harder, all so silently, all the time wondering how the world could be so cruel.
She wasn’t supposed to die.
​
by Alexis Aulepp
From what we have gathered, it is likely that she accidentally overdosed on her arthritis medication. Or maybe it had been some odd drug interaction her doctor had not been careful enough to foresee. Or maybe or maybe or maybe.
It’s all so hard to piece together.
But I remember hearing that a family friend had called to say she hadn't shown up for her weekly hair appointment. I remember finding out that my uncle had let himself into her house when nobody answered the door. I remember they said he found her lying on her bathroom floor.
And by the time the ambulance had come with the oxygen, her brain had been too deprived to function as brains should.
Cells had been dying and burning until even seven years wouldn’t be long enough to fix the damage that had been done.
The doctors said she would never be the same. They put her in a medically induced coma and told somebody that if they did manage to wake her up, one day, it wouldn’t be the same person. It would be a three-year-old, not my grandmother, who would open its eyes to the world. We would have to teach her how to eat. We would have to teach her how to walk, how to talk. She wouldn’t remember any of our names.
​
Dead, but not really dead, they had said. But not alive.
When they pulled the plug, she eventually stopped breathing, and the roof of the burned-out house finally collapsed for good.
There would be no more moving on.
I was eight years old. For the longest time, I thought it was seven. But that, too, was faulty memory. Just like I thought she had been in the hospital for weeks – always painfully out of reach – but my parents later said it was days.
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Still, how can you quantify the breaking?
For a suddenly lonely child, the only natural solace is the moon. I do not remember how many stars I wished on, or how many twinkling lights I counted before my eyes blurred with enough tears that my lunar companion was the only one left to shine down on me as I sat, huddled on the floor of my bedroom, breathing raggedly.
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I remember being angry. Angry and confused. I wanted to scream at God, at whoever would listen, but I didn’t want to talk.
by Alexis Aulepp
At least, I don’t remember talking with anyone. I remember bottling up my emotions and staring moodily out the car window, trying with minimal effort not to let anyone see the silent tears pooling in my eyes and rolling down my cheeks.
I was so tired.
I remember going back to school, eventually, and finding myself randomly overwhelmed by what I had lost. I remember being sullen. Being silent. Withdrawn. I do not remember if any of this actually happened, but I remember it nonetheless.
I remember personality changes. Life outlook changes. I remember thinking everyone who ever told me I was mature for my age or wise beyond my years was an idiot. They didn’t know the half of it.
I remember staring people straight in the face and saying nothing. Nothing at all. Taking a deep, invisible breath through my nose and tearing them apart with my eyes the way a mother can silence her child with a look.
I remember thinking awful thoughts. Thoughts about how this wasn’t the grandmother I would have chosen to lose, if I had been given the choice. Thoughts about how wills and inheritances and family drama were better left to those who could be rational and unemotional. Thoughts about how nothing would ever be the same again.
It was easier, I think, to shut off in those times. To pull back. To numb and numb and numb until I could tell myself, in a detached sort of way, that this was better. That it didn’t hurt as much anymore. That the stoic would inherit the strength to move on.
​
by Alexis Aulepp
No one calls an eight-year-old depressed – at least, I don’t recall it happening in my day – but, looking back, I wonder if that is where a lot of my lifelong inner turmoil started.
And, for better or worse, it is also, perhaps, what I can accredit to my rich inner world.
The trope of the tortured artist is overdone, but that doesn’t negate its truth. From an early age, I dabbled with reading as an escape from what I was experiencing and writing as an escape through it.
For as long as I can remember, writing has been my form of self-therapy. Getting my words out of the chaotic flock swirling and swooping in my head and onto the page – aligned in neat or scrambled black marks, wings high and twisted like birds – helps me see the picture for what it is, and that small semblance of control has always been comforting.
And, whether from my efforts or the bittersweet erosion of time, it did get easier to handle the memory of my grandmother as I grew older.
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But it was a double-edged sword.
Though the screeching claws that raked my windpipe dulled with each new iteration against the chalkboard, I also felt like I was losing some of my own edge.
The memories I had of her began to come and go in waves. Blank spots began to appear as if I had tossed my box of memories into the ocean, and only some of them washed back up onto the shore. With each new pulling and pushing of the tide, less and less of the original treasure came up to swirl against my feet, and sometimes it would wash back out again before I could dive to retrieve it.
Memory, in that way, is both cruel and kind.
How bitter the taste would be to remember each tragic turn so poignantly, and yet, how sad it is to feel something slip away in such a manner – experiencing, for a moment, the profound sense of loss that accompanies losing something you cannot place your finger on, followed by the blissful numbness of forgetting that you ever lost something in the first place.
Looking back now, I see the gaps. I can fill some of them in with short, long-awaited talks with my parents about that time in our lives, but I also think, to a certain extent, I want to leave what I remember intact.
There is something worthwhile in adding to my memories, but there is also something to be said for what I’ve carried with me each time my cells change over. While they may not tell the complete picture, or even an always factually accurate picture, my memories have shaped and been shaped by the person I’ve become.
I hesitate to say that the loss of my grandmother at a young age has “all been worth it,” or something to that affect, but now, with distance, I can trace the ways that that period of my life was vital in making me who I am today. And, from this impactful event, as hard as it seemed at the time, I’ve learned something important:
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Trauma is never easy – and trauma is rarely good – but good can come from it. Rebirth doesn’t have to look like complete recovery; rebirth can be healing and strength and scars that are tougher than the skin around them. It can be cells that grow again after old ones die, and rebuilding after the fire, prepared to make new memories in new houses; Always moving forward, but carrying in our pockets the ability to look back.
If nothing else, that, I think, is something worth remembering.
by Alexis Aulepp
