I can’t remember the last time I hugged her.
I can only remember the last time I didn’t.
Last summer, we drove the two hours up I-95 to see her before I flew to Colorado for the fall. We lost my abuelo to cancer when I was ten, so she had been living alone for a long time in a brick house in Bethesda, Maryland. She made the beds for us a lot, we drove up a lot.
This year was different. We know how.
Suddenly, she needed to be alone, which was to say she needed to be safe. Isolating was safe. So she sat in her house for over a year, watching telenovelas on a tiny screen from the seventies with rabbit ear antenna and grainy, discolored faces. She ate bread, pasta, empanadas, alfajores, Milano cookies, and the occasional Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar. She sat in the kitchen by her corded telephone with her address book open and called everyone she knew and everyone she loved, just to see how they were doing. Every day. I was one of them.
We went to see her so she could see us. I got in a vicious argument with my dad in the car. My mom begged us to stop. I apologized and he did not. My eyes were puffy, my throat sore, when we arrived. I didn’t feel like talking. I was angry. It was over one hundred degrees. I felt uncomfortably swaddled in the balmy heat and heady weight of the humidity. We sat on her sun-soaked patio, ten feet away from where she set up a chair in her doorway. I sat with my shoulders hunched in the way she did not like. We ate pizza. She liked margherita.
She wasn’t the greatest listener. She got upset that we refused to go inside. She thought our reasons were senseless. She wanted to see our whole faces for the whole time, to fix my frizzy hair and adjust my shirt. My mother and I had been volunteering in Richmond, so we didn’t want to get near her. We were thinking of what we believed to be the worst-case scenario.
Then we had to leave. She didn’t make up the beds this time, to sit and chat and complain and bicker for a few hours. That was all we got, all she got. When we stood, I looked at her and motioned to give her an air hug, whispering, “Un abrazo.” She looked at me, and she looked at my mom. She began to tremble, a choke escaping her in a way that made me lightheaded. I had never seen her cry. It was horrible.
We quickly promised we would come again soon, that I would call her right when my flight landed. We descended the patio steps, rattled by her sudden display of emotion. We waved as we pulled out of the driveway. She had a handkerchief balled up in her hand and I could still see how her face scrunched with the discontentment and inexplicable frustration of this year and its new rules.
My mom and I spoke briefly about how upsetting it all was. How alone she was. How helpless it all felt. How thankful we were that she was healthy, at least. When I would be home for fall break to see her from a distance again. I didn’t want to make my mom more upset by crying. I cry easily – from laughter, from frustration, from the temper that I have and do not like.
But this was different. There was an unspoken fear in our conversation, one that we would not address. It was the don’t-dare-speak-it-into-existence kind of fear, one of the many poisonous what-ifs that accompanied the first months of the pandemic when there was no fathomable end in sight. We tread lightly around it. But my abuela was eighty-three, and I had invasive thoughts. The drive back was long.The flight to Colorado was longer.
We loved her so much. She loved us so much. I wish I could give her a hug now. But that was it. I hadn’t known.
She died in April. Suddenly and unexpectedly.
There’s no resolution now. Just a painful memory and a visceral feeling. Of desired touch. Of abrupt emptiness, insurmountable loss. Grief. Some sort of resolution, I guess, plays out within all of us who knew her. I’m still waiting.
I talked to her on the phone the day before. She complained about the rain and asked me when graduation was. I had talked to her every week since I was little. I didn’t want her to feel alone. Sundays at four p.m. now feel so hollow.
Every time, she asked me when I was coming home. I planned to fly back right after graduation and stay with her for the summer – a fully vaccinated kid finally feeling a bit of hope for her abuela’s situation.
She was ridiculous and complicated and particular and stubborn. She didn’t want to get vaccinated because she feared doctor’s offices and hospitals. That was where her husband had died. I convinced her by telling her how much I loved and missed her, how much I wanted to see her and hug her. Te quiero, te extraño, y hasta prontito por favor. She was my best friend. She did so much for me, I wanted to give her a fraction of a thank you. I wanted to do anything for her. Except I wouldn’t give her a hug last summer – that could’ve hurt her.
Now we are the ones alone. My veins are filled with a hurt beyond description. An obscene, guttural, never-ending damnation of this horrific year. It closes my throat, rejects food and water, makes my hands shake, my body shudder, and my mind splinter. I can only describe it as away. What am I touching and what am I connected to? What do I even want to be connected to in a place that takes when you need it not to?
I want to lay in a grassy field and feel swallowed by the dew and weight of the weather as I did that last time I saw her. I want to lay there and scream until something feels a little better, or different. Until I get the sense that the universe understands what it has done. That something is sorry. I am angry now as I was on that day. But this anger subsists and seethes more than any argument I’ve ever had. It burns in my chest with the helplessness that death forces upon us.
Her vaccine appointment was scheduled for the day after it happened. I told her over the phone how proud I was. How ready I was to see her so soon.
We tried to do everything right. I didn’t give my abuela a hug because we wanted to keep her safe. So we could hug her again someday.
I wanted to hug her then. I want to hug her now. I can’t remember the last time I did.
Como cada despedida:
Te quiero, te extraño, y hasta prontito.