Snap-Crackle-Pop

I sit, I have sat, I am sitting still—seven years in—the grown-up child of a sick-bed sleeping parent, loosened, shifted, transformed, transmuted in my grief. Labels sting me. I talk about loss far more than I think I should and still less than I want to. I worry that I’ve become someone who can write about nothing else. I shift through memories. It’s been years now, one blurring into three, into six, into seven, into this-is-the-rest-of-my-life. Remembrance comes back in visions, flimsy dervishes of memory that I hold on to for barely a second before they’re whisked away by something more urgent, pressing, present. 

The thing with living in crisis is you never know when things will snap—when everything is wrong, it’s nearly impossible to tell someone where the wrongness begins. How do you describe the moment you learned that while some parents leave through open doors, other parents dissolve into their sickbeds? I’ve lingered over bowls of cereal while listening to adults parse through doctors’ instructions, while my sisters read through prescriptions and side effects, while they recited, reviewed, reconciled. 

I felt the snap-crackle-pop of childhood in my mouth at the same time as I felt the sharp twang of a heartbreak begin—an aging heartbreak that goes on, lingers, fizzles, settles, effervesces. 

Lately, I struggle most with what it means to be here, to explain that I’m here, but I was there too—twelve and realizing for the first time that we’d helped pack more overnight hospital bags for her than we’d packed sleepover bags for ourselves, that it was too late now to wish for a different life, we were too far gone to feel any adolescent remorse for it. The idea of laughing was once such a bitter thing in my mouth, and I felt weighed down by the heaviness of the worst-that-could-be. 

I write, and falter when writing, about those years of seeing the world in symptoms and side effects, those long nights of dreaming in prescription. 

The thing with living in crisis is you never know when things will crackle. I remember being nine years old, reading the titles of books on my sisters’ bookshelves, enamored by Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe—the black and red cover, the soft shiny feel of it in my hand, and the sound of the words in my mouth: things fall apart, things fall apart, things fall apart. Cracking open the book, I remember the crushing feeling of realizing this was one of those big-girl books, intellectually inaccessible to a fourth grader. Many years later, I read “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats, in and out of my mother’s hospital rooms, and felt my breath catch the same way when I read those words again: 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned 

I am here now, but often, I am there too—seventeen and finding the language to describe watching a parent fade slowly, taking a route to recovery that never actually led to recovery, that took her instead through a series of hospital visits, insurance policies, and pharmaceutical companies. I thought often, standing outside that hospital room: Ah, here we are, witness to the fact that things have fallen apart and that the centre cannot hold. 

When I watched my mother, led to bed by nurses and doctors, when I watched her watch us—her grown-too-fast children reaching into our school uniforms for one last magic trick—when I watched her watch us come up empty-handed, when I watched her watch us lose hope, I thought: here we go, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. 

The thing with living in crisis is waiting for the pop to come. Remembering, three, four, five, six years later, the crawling, suffocating exhaustion of holding on to hope. Holding on to hope like a big red balloon, even when hospital rooms became second homes, because still, at least, they were homes. Homesick now, I choke on the smell of antiseptics, stiffen when I hear ambulances, and crave, strangely, the spaghetti bolognese and chocolate milk served in the cafeteria of the large international hospital where I would wait with her.

And I’m here now, but I was there too—eighteen and two days old, standing outside her room, knowing somewhere deep in my bones that the days were almost over, and that I’d repeated the clichés of facing my fears so often they meant nothing anymore. My fear had mutated, transformed, taken new shape. I told myself that the face of my fear was the same face of my beloved, that I’d look her in the eye and there would be my mother, somewhere. 

What I can’t remember—though I try—is the exact moment grief began, when it became necessary to start imagining what that goodbye might feel like. 

The thing with living in crisis is that one day you’re done, and there is no crisis. I linger over the snap-crackle-pop of my now-occasional bowls of cereal, transported into memory when I least expect it. I am more likely to forget things now, and I almost do forget, before I’m jolted—jam jars, cereal bowls, sunlight on my father’s face, her handwriting, slipping out on a scrap of paper in a book I don’t recall her reading.

I am always remembering, even when I am trying to forget.

 I snap-crackle-pop with remembrance.

If there is a finality, a moment in which I am fully here, I have not yet arrived. I am here, transformed and seven years in, but I am there too, still—my grief new and young, flung upon the world.