Grief announces itself in the smallest details. Before it becomes a word, before it takes the shape of tears or rituals, it first alters the texture of the world. Within grief light sharpens, sounds stretch, time loses its steady pulse. That is what I felt this morning as I stood at my grandmother’s bedside, watching her breath rise and fall in fragile, diminishing arcs. She had passed beyond responsiveness, though when I brushed her hair and spoke softly, she moved just enough to let me know she still recognized the cadence of my voice. That slight motion felt like a final act of acknowledgment, a last flicker of relational presence.
The room was already saturated with the premonitions of death. It was saturate with it's stillness, its irregular rhythms, the solemn choreography families practice without instruction. My parents, exhausted from the long night, sat close, their silence heavy with everything they could not say without breaking. In the background, my mother cycled through Grandma’s old Christmas CDs, searching for something that felt right, though death rarely accommodates such desires. And so, by sheer accident, Barry Manilow’s “Jingle Bells” rose into the air, bright and incongruously cheerful, underscoring her dying with a melody that should have belonged to holiday shopping aisles rather than to the threshold of mortality. That dissonance, joyful music at the edge of life, captured something essential: death occurs inside the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
At 10:35, Grandma’s best friend arrived with a Christmas present she had lovingly selected, unaware of the gravity awaiting her. The present was a small, soft blanket bearing Matthew 28:10; after she said her goodbye and stepped out, we laid the blanket gently across Grandma. This simple act of leave-taking became the last gift Grandma received in this life. A prayer, a goodbye, a hand held in farewell, these became the last threads connecting her to us. And then, subtly, the shift began. Her face slackened into repose. Her hands and feet grew cold. Her breath grew erratic, shallow, sharp. As if keeping to her own internal logic of order and timing, she waited until the hospice nurse arrived just after 11:00, a final gesture of propriety. And at just past 11:00 AM, the very hour we had gathered every Sunday for more than forty years to share lunch, she passed. It was as though her life closed with the punctuation of routine, a ritual transformed into a moment of departure.
I am still in shock. My mind keeps replaying those minutes, searching for something to anchor myself to. But shock is not linear. Shock distorts and refracts. Psychologists call it a rupture in the “assumptive world,” the invisible scaffolding that allows us to believe that life tomorrow will resemble life today. When a primary loss tears that structure away, perception falters. Even the most ordinary tasks become labyrinths. Later, as I found myself at Walmart, the aisles seemed to stretch in unfamiliar ways. I went to grab a bag of chips for the Chiefs game, but somewhere between the entrance and the snack section, I became disoriented. I walked past displays I did not recognize. I forgot where I was. I found myself at the back of the store, looking at containers of lemonade. And without thinking, I wondered whether Grandma might want some, as I had wondered a hundred times these past years. The reflex was instantaneous, born of a life oriented around her needs. And then the realization broke over me: she would not need anything anymore.
The chips eventually appeared. But I was not the same person who had walked in. Something in the constant internal narrative of who I am had fractured. And with that fracture came a revelation I am still struggling to hold: with her death, I am no longer a grandson. Not in the living sense. That role, so fundamental and so defining, has evaporated in an instant. Who am I now? Who will I be tomorrow?
This is where my mind returned, almost instinctively, to Flora by Ramon Casas i Carbó. At first glance, Flora may seem too lush, too sensuous for a day of death. A reclining woman draped in a deep green gown rests against a cascade of loose, confident brushstrokes. Her body is warm, flushed, alive. She appears suspended between waking and dreaming, her eyes half-lidded, her expression both inviting and introspective. And yet what drew me today was not her vitality but the flowers. Those beautiful red blossoms arranged beside her. Their petals, delicate and luminous, seem freshly gathered, their stems still green. Held against the pale fabric, they form a small constellation of tenderness.
This afternoon, they reminded me of the rose my father placed near Grandma’s hands after she died. A single rose. A perfect rose. A gift to my grandma from my ex-wife who grandma loves so much. After three weeks of relentless decline, three weeks in which her body tightened, weakened, and fought, the rose felt like a quiet benediction, a final offering of beauty to someone who had given so much of it to us across a lifetime. The flowers in Casas’s painting, like the rose on Grandma’s bed, do not mourn. They do not interpret. They simply remain, luminous in their impermanence.
What resonates so deeply is the painting’s liminalit: the reclining figure suspended between tension and relaxation, presence and withdrawal. Casas paints threshold states, those moments when the body shifts subtly from active to still. And today, I saw my grandmother in that threshold. I saw her in the quiet transitions between breaths, in the gentle slack of her jaw, in the way the whole world gathered around her as though holding vigil at a boundary neither of us could cross.
Shock often manifests as disorientation, but beneath it lies something more profound: the recognition that identity is relational. Who we are is shaped, reinforced, and reflected by those who know us intimately. For years, especially after the divorce, my life has been interwoven with Grandma’s: multiple calls a day, shared meals, errands, grocery runs, ice cream trips, the small improvisations of care that became the architecture of my days. This caregiving was not a burden so much we it was a rhythm I found myself in. It structured time. It oriented my choices. It grounded me in a sense of purpose. With her gone, that scaffolding has collapsed. A life organized around tending, checking in, and showing up suddenly has no place to go.
Death, then, is not just an absence, it is a reordering. It rearranges the internal calendar, disrupts the flow of expectation, and unsettles one’s sense of self. The world continues—cars in the Walmart parking lot, Christmas displays, game-day snacks—but the mourner walks through it as someone newly dislodged. Casas’s Flora embodies that feeling: a figure resting in stillness, surrounded by signs of life that she neither fully engages nor resists. It is an image of the in-between, where beauty persists but meaning remains unresolved.
Tonight, I cannot yet make meaning from this loss. Meaning is a long labor, one that grief demands but never rushes. For now, I can only record the contours of the day as faithfully as memory allows: my grandmother’s final breaths, the rose near her hands, the blanket across her legs, the absurdity of Barry Manilow at the hour of death, the shock of wandering aisles without knowing why, the sudden realization that I am no longer who I was.
Flora rests in her painting, suspended between worlds of vitality and dream, presence and surrender. I feel myself suspended too, trying to understand the shape of the world without the person who helped form it these past years. There is a heaviness to this day, a before-and-after that will not reconcile easily. But in the red flowers beside Casas’s figure, and in the single rose by my grandmother’s hands, I see a quiet truth: beauty can accompany us, even at the end. And grief, for all its disorientation, is also a form of love. It is an echo of the ways we were shaped, tended, and held even when the throne drew blood.