Sitting With Grief

My grandmother died in October. She’s the person who taught me patience, though she never would have used that word — she just gardened, and wrote long letters by hand, and never once seemed to be in a hurry about anything, in a way I found almost unbearable as a kid and have been trying to learn from as an adult. The week after, I was too busy for grief in the practical sense: calls, arrangements, the strange administrative weight that follows a death. There wasn’t room to actually feel it yet.

The first time I sat back down on the cushion afterward, I expected one of two things — either nothing, because I was too depleted to feel anything, or a full collapse, because I finally had ten quiet minutes with nowhere to put my attention but inward. Neither happened. I got a kind of restless flatness instead, my mind skittering to grocery lists and old arguments and anywhere except toward her, like it was avoiding a bruise.

It found the bruise a few days later, without my permission. Mid-breath, for no reason I could point to, I thought of her handwriting on a recipe card I’d taken from her kitchen, and the grief arrived cleanly and all at once, the way weather does. I didn’t fight it and I didn’t manage it particularly well either. I just sat there while it moved through, which is a smaller accomplishment than it sounds like, and also the only one available to me that morning.

Practice didn’t teach me how to stop grieving. It taught me I could sit in the middle of it without needing to fix it first.

That’s become the actual use of these ten minutes lately — not calm, not insight, just one part of the day where I’m not required to be okay or not-okay, only present for whatever shows up. Some sits are just grief with a timer running. That counts.

I keep her recipe card taped inside a kitchen cabinet now, and some mornings I look at it before I sit, not to think anything in particular, just to notice it’s there. I don’t know what the practice equivalent of that is called. It doesn’t need a name.