Things You Think About as Your Family Drives Away From Your House After the Holidays
By: Ziv W.
Tags: Holidays, Death, Loss, Family

The way time passes is a wound. You don’t think it is until you reach a certain age, and until you hit that point you tend to think everyone’s silly for waxing nostalgic about the past. Then suddenly you’re [insert age here — for me it was 27] and you want to learn about the family lore and your ancestry, and you get weird around the holidays, and New Year’s Eve becomes not an excuse to make out with someone but an opportunity to evaluate the entirety of your life. The way time passes is a wound, and a haunting, together.

*

I remember my grandma standing alone at the window waving goodbye to our family as we drove away after the holidays. As a kid I’d never considered how lonely she must’ve felt, and even now I can only access a tiny taste of that loneliness. So much is hitting me about time, lost time, all at once. I’m in my late 20s, and I never expected to be this old (now that I am, I have no idea what to do with myself). I have friends in their 40s, which is forever the age I see my parents as even though they’re approaching 60. My younger cousins are graduating college, but I see them as preteens. My oldest uncle is 73, but I still envision him as he looked at 45. My older sister is in her 30s but I see her as 27, which is what I am, and her son is 11 but Isee him as 6. All my relatives are frozen in time in my head.

For the first time, I grasp what people mean when they say the years go by faster and faster as you get older — and I don’t know what to do with this knowledge. Every day feels like it lasts forever because I don’t necessarily enjoy my days individually, but once a month or two goes by I mourn those days more than I could’ve imagined. This year went by like a snap, even though it was all endless quarantine.

*

My grandma lived alone and she hated it. She missed my grandpa every single day; never got over his death. I must’ve sensed her loneliness a little bit — a tiny fractional bit — because my younger sister and I would hide love notes all around her house after leaving each holiday. We wanted her to have a taste of our presence for weeks after we’d left, loved to imagine her coming across those notes in her sweater drawer or under her pillow or stuck to the milk jug in the fridge. Yes, we must’ve known she was lonely, but we couldn’t have fathomed how much.

*

My family just left after spending Christmas at my place. I can’t believe I’m old enough to have hosted a family Christmas in the first place, can’t wrap my head around what that means. I don’t even have a close relationship with my family, but when they left I stood on the sidewalk and waved and waved to them even when they were so far down the road they couldn’t have seen me anymore. I wondered if anyone was watching me and thinking I looked stupid. I imagined my grandma at the apartment window behind me waving at them, too. I imagined her waving at me as I was waving at them, like we were caught in a perpetual loop of family saying goodbye to family and mourning the passage of time and feeling lonely and being afraid at the great expanse of Whatever that lies before us, waiting for us to experience it alone, alone, alone.

When my parents’ car turned out of sight, I went back into my house and I allowed myself to feel exactly nothing. I carefully closed the door and turned around and made eye contact with my cat. She looked back at me, but she couldn’t understand what I was feeling — any more than I could understand what my grandma was feeling back then. I stared at my cat’s round, unblinking eyes for a long time. Then I took off all my clothes and turned off all the lights and took one and a half edibles. I set a timer for 1 hour so that I would know when I could stop manually repressing my emotions and the edibles would do it for me.

I thought/tried not to think about what my grandma did after our family left each holiday. I imagined her going back to her sink full of dishes and singing to herself in that quavering, beautiful voice that she disliked so much (even though I still hear that voice in my dreams and wake up excited to see her). Or maybe she turned away from the window and cried, which I can’t even bear. Maybe she started immediately searching for the love notes we’d left behind, or maybe she tried to draw out that process for as long as possible in hopes that there would always be one more note left.

*

This Christmas, my mom talked about how she thinks of herself as being in her 30s even though she’s in her 50s, and how she thinks of her parents as being in their 50s even though they’re both dead. I am reminded of how I can’t believe I’m in my late 20s when I feel like I’m still in college, even though I’ve been out for years. I think about how none of us feel like the age we are, apparently, and then I wonder with a sense of great foreboding why we seem to get stuck at certain ages. It scares me to think that someday I’ll be my mom’s age talking about how I feel like I’m in my 20s or 30s, telling whoever’s around that it feels like my mom should be in her 50s but she’s actually in her 80s and how it feels like my grandma should be alive but she’s not and hasn’t been for many years. It scares me to think that on a meta-scale, someday I’ll be telling people how I remember my mom telling me she felt like she was 30 when she was 50, and I was 27 at the time when she told me that but now I’m in my 50s and I can imagine how she felt back then, and how she’s in her 80s now but probably feels like she’s still in her 50s and that’s how old I am now (because someday I will be 50 even though that’s incomprehensible). And all of this is just allowed to happen.

*

I don’t remember a single thing about my grandma’s funeral, which probably means something. I do remember the last time I visited her grave, which feels like it was 6 months ago but was probably several years ago. My parents and I stood at her grave and they said some things I don’t remember, and my mom cried for a little bit. They eventually walked back to the car, and I kept standing at the grave — felt rooted there, but not in a calm or soothing way. It felt like there was a lot I’d never said and still couldn’t say, even to empty air.

I wanted to say things like: you were my safe place when I was younger, or you were the first person who died that I really cared about and that’s important, or I’ve still never grieved you, or — maybe most pivotally — you were the first person who made me think about loss.

Because it was loss, every time she stood at the window alone and waved goodbye to us. I couldn’t have imagined it back then. I was just a kid in a puffy winter coat, bundled up amongst my new Christmas presents in a stuffy car with loud siblings and parents and all the chaos of a young family just setting out in the world. I was a kid waving goodbye from the car window, happy and unaware, thinking about all the notes my grandma was going to find throughout the house during my absence.

I knew she would miss us, but I didn’t know what that meant. I missed her in the sense that I was disappointed that I wouldn’t get to see her until the summer. She missed me in the sense that her house was empty, silent, empty, silent, and she was one person alone amidst a vast expanse of ghosts. She missed me in the sense that she was like a ghost herself, the kind you see in horror movies: standing alone at the window looking out on people living a type of life you can’t access anymore. When I think of her at the window I think of it like a haunting, because it was. Because time was haunting her, because it’s a wound and a haunting together, and it turns us all into ghosts eventually, ghosts that perpetually reach back in time and reach back in time.