I’m still learning how to talk about grief
It’s the 24th anniversary of my sister’s death. My mother and I don’t know what to say to each other.
I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately, but who hasn’t? With the COVID-19 death toll in America rising every day, it’s hard — practically impossible — not to be aware of it. Death is everywhere, and it always has been, but it didn’t need to be like this. Death is inevitable, but the massive loss of life in the past year wasn’t.
But this week, I’ve been thinking about death and its life-partner, grief, more than I normally do, because today, January 22nd, is the 24th anniversary of my sister’s death.
Her name was Luana, and she lived for less than one day in 1997. I’ve never known what to do with my grief for her. She died one year before I was born, so I never met her. Grieving for someone I’ve never met feels wrong, and calling her my sister feels dishonest because we never had the chance to be sisters.
Forgetting her feels worse, though. If I say that I’m an only child or that I grew up with my cousin who is essentially my big brother, then isn’t that kind of a lie, in and of itself? Even though we never got the chance to know each other, I was raised with the spectre of my mother’s grief — invisible and hypervisible, subtle and sharp, everywhere and nowhere all at once — so I know that if Luana had lived, my life would’ve been very different. My father has also made it clear that he only wanted one child, and was hoping it would be a boy, so I may have never existed — a concept that the past year has made pretty appealing on certain days.
It’s a catch-22, and however I end up feeling on January 22nd, it always feels like the wrong emotion. Too little of it, and too much of this whirlwind of loss that feels irresponsible to talk about out loud, lest I make what is already a painful day for my family even worse.
But this year, I can’t stop thinking about death, about grief, about loss, about Luana.
It started on Sunday. Because she wouldn’t be able to go on Friday, my mother visited Luana’s grave a little early this year. She tried to light a candle, but it was too windy and the flame wouldn’t hold. She had told me about her plans the day before, and trying to compensate for not being there, I FaceTimed her at the cemetery.
We talked a little about the day, about the weather, about how there are so many new graves. We talked about my maternal grandfather, Aurel, who passed after a long battle with three kinds of cancer in 2014. We talked a little about my paternal grandfather, Mihai, who also passed in 1997 (an annus horribilis for the family). We didn’t really talk about Luana, partly because I cry easily, and I would definitely have started crying in my apartment in Los Angeles. Excessive emotions and FaceTime don’t work well together.
After we hung up, with the promise of doing a big family FaceTime on my uncle’s birthday, which falls on January 21st, I went on with my day, and I think my mother did the same.
On Monday, I woke up thinking about Treasure chocolates. When I was little, we always had bags of it lying around the house because my father liked them — whenever he found some food item he would eat, the rest of the family bought in bulk. I liked them, too. The wrapping was purple — my favorite color — and they were shaped like treasure chests, which reminded me of pirates, which reminded me of Treasure Planet. The fact that I liked them annoyed my father, because they were his and nobody will love a girl who eats too much chocolate.
But when I was five years old and visiting my family’s podunk hometown in Eastern Romania for the first time, I was given a treat because I had been well-behaved and spoke Romanian while visiting a long-lost friend. I can’t remember what we were talking about, but somehow the conversation turned to me wanting siblings.
“You’d hate having one,” my father said. Then he added, “You almost had one, actually.” This was news to me, and although it wasn’t news to my mother, I don’t think this was how she wanted me to find out. Then, my father bowed out of the conversation and let my mother explain to me that before I was born, there was another baby, but she died. I ate five Treasure chocolate chests. No one said anything.
Let me explain something to you about Romanians: we don’t talk about anything. Everything we learn about our family comes out of a once-in-a-blue-moon desire from our parents to confess something, or little details we pick up over time. If I never said I wanted a sister, or saw a baby picture that looked like me but wasn’t me, or noticed a second set of baby hand-and-foot prints, I may not have learned about Luana until… whenever I noticed those things and asked.
It’s not that we don’t want to talk about the hard things, or that we’ve forgotten — we just don’t know how, and it’s hard to learn. When grief is death by a thousand cuts and there’s no doctor in sight, a bandaid seems like a good idea.
The other thing is that we express our grief with food. Not with people bringing the mourners food, but with the mourners making food for everybody else, which is something I’ve never been able to understand. We cook to honor the dead right after they’re gone, and we cook to honor them long after they’ve passed, too. It’s a tradition, a love language, called pomana, which loosely translates to English as “alms.”
Basically, from my bastardized Romanian-American understanding, you cook or bake something, and share it with people you love, people you respect, and/or the people in your life in the name of the deceased. I’ve thought about making something on Friday, but I’m not sure what; most traditional Romanian foods are a two-to-six person job, and I don’t want to subject my roommates to me trying to bake.
What is something appropriate to make in honor of Luana? I don’t know. I wish I did. I wish there was a cookbook for this situation.
On Tuesday, I’m still thinking about food — partly because I need to go grocery shopping, and partly because one of the few tangible facts I have about Luana is that, in the words of my mother, she was a picky eater. During her pregnancy, one of the few things that didn’t make my mother violently ill was mint ice cream. It’s still one of my mother’s favorites, and one of mine, too.
When you only have fragments of something, they can cut more deeply. Luana should be 24 years old today, and we — my family — should have more of her than that. More of her than a few photos, a hand print, and a handful of sad memories that we’d rather not have.
But we don’t.
On Wednesday, I met up with my screenwriters’ group via Zoom. We always talk about what we’ve watched that week. We talked about Pieces of a Woman, which I had recommended last week, and at that moment, kind of wished that I hadn’t. My mother watched it a few weeks ago, too, but we didn’t talk about it.
That writers’ group conversation made me remember why Luana isn’t here today: because the doctor wouldn’t listen to a poor immigrant woman who didn’t speak English, and her husband — mine and Luana’s poor immigrant father with his perfect, unaccented English — believed in taking the doctor’s word over his wife’s pain.
Maybe that’s why we don’t talk about Luana a lot. Her grief is in Romanian, visceral, and mine is in English, a shadow. My father doesn’t mourn. This is my mother’s grief. It’s hers, and she gave it to me. It’s something we share, but we can’t talk about it. We don’t mourn in the same language.
She texts me that she’s making Russian honey cake for my uncle’s birthday. I mention that I tried to make mini-cheesecakes for pomana, but they didn’t turn out just right.
It’s on Thursday that I decide I want to write this, because I’ve always been better at unknotting my emotions in the written word, where I can backspace and delete and rewrite. I don’t think I’m Romanian enough to put my heart into food. It’s harder than I thought it would be — this is the first time I’ve written about Luana. It makes her real. It makes me miss her. It makes me cry, two decades of emotions I don’t feel the right to have, but that are squatting in my mind anyway, bubbling up.
I FaceTime the family for my uncle’s birthday. It’s obvious that I’ve cried today. My mother asks me what’s wrong, but I can’t give a real answer. Nothing is technically wrong. I’m invisible and hypervisible, subtle and sharp, everywhere and nowhere all at once.
We don’t say it, but we both know this has something to do with Luana — tomorrow is the 22nd. It’s 24 years. “You should eat something,” she says. “I think you should order something for you and your roommates.” For pomana. To honor the dead. I shake my head and insist that it’s fine. We have leftovers.
Today is Friday.
I’m going to buy mint ice cream.
I’m going to order Thai.
I’m going to call my mom.
