The Story of My Grandmother
Growing up, my grandmother was the center of my world. My mother worked, so it fell to her to raise me, and the two of us built something warm and easy between us. We did the housework side by side. We talked about school, about my friends, about the people next door. She caught colds and small illnesses more than most, but none of that dimmed her. She stayed busy around the house and never seemed worn out by it. From her I learned to cook, to look after other people, to treat the people around me like family. A lot of what I believe about living well came from standing next to her at the sink. I never doubted that she loved me.
The year I started college, she got sick. The diagnosis was cancer. She stopped being able to eat, and I watched her body get smaller week by week. One month after the doctors told us, she was gone. It happened fast. I stayed with her through her last night, and she died the following day while I was out handling errands and obligations. My father called to tell me. I stood there not understanding the words. She would not speak to me again. I would not hear her voice carrying across the house calling for me. Something in me went numb.
Part of me knew she was old and had suffered, and that dying freed her from a month of pain. Knowing that did not make it go down any easier. I did not cry until the funeral. Once the ceremony ended, I found I couldn't walk back into my own house. Her presence was everywhere in it. I broke down on the doorstep and collapsed there, and after that I remember nothing. My memory of falling on the step just cuts to black. My parents and friends, who were grieving her too, ended up more frightened by the state I was in than by the loss itself.
After the hospital I barely ate. Every room, every chore pulled her back into my mind. I wanted to talk to her so badly it ached. Washing the dishes or scrubbing the floor would drop me straight into the memory of the last time we had done it together.
Losing her was the worst pain I have ever felt, and the strangest aftereffect was this: I became afraid to love anyone at all. I pulled away from people. I avoided them. The feeling was completely foreign to me. My parents gave me two months to pull myself together and come back to normal life. The withdrawal lasted more than four. There was a stretch where I cried every single day.
My mother finally took me to a psychiatrist. She explained everything while I sat there, and he said almost nothing. He simply handed me a book: "Many Lives, Many Masters" by Dr. Brian L. Weiss. I was baffled and more than a little doubtful, but I read it anyway. It tells the real account of a respected psychiatrist and a patient he treated using past-life therapy, and how the work ended up changing both of them. His patient, Catherine, came to him with an anxiety disorder, panic attacks, and a range of phobias. He tried every clinical method he knew and none of it held. When he moved to hypnosis, the sessions took an unexpected turn. Under hypnosis Catherine recalled memories that weren't from this life, and those memories turned out to be the root of her recurring nightmares and her attacks. She described having lived 86 times in physical form, in different places and eras, as both a man and a woman.
Before Catherine, the doctor had dismissed reincarnation as a religious idea tied to Buddhism and Hinduism and nothing more. The sessions wore down his skepticism. Reading about them wore down mine.
The passage that lifted my fear of loss was the doctor describing how the work had altered him. He wrote that he felt more hope, more joy, more purpose, more satisfaction, and that it slowly dawned on him he was losing his fear of death. He was no longer afraid of his own end or of not existing. He was less afraid of losing other people too, even though he knew he would miss them. Those lines stayed with me. My grandmother, I thought, has probably been born somewhere else already. The part that mattered most was that I stopped being afraid of death. I would miss the people I lost, yes, but I could sit with that, knowing they would arrive again somewhere new.
The thought of dying frightens most of us. The idea of leaving the world terrorizes us. After that book I stopped seeing it that way. We don't leave at all. We come back, again and again, into the same world, in new places, as different people.