In these first days after my grandmother’s death, the world feels subtly but unmistakably altered. Nothing looks different, and yet everything sits at a strange angle, as though the horizon has been gently shifted while I wasn’t looking. The silence is the first thing I notice. For years, my grandmother’s call began each day before I had fully come into consciousness. Listening to a message she left, I could hear her voice offering assurance, routine, and presence. Now the phone stays still, and the absence feels physical, heavy, a pressure behind the ribs. Morning has not so much arrived as failed to arrive. In the words of Marcus Aurelius, “The whole life is but a point in time,” and mine has pivoted abruptly into its next, disorienting point.
It is into this altered landscape that I step into the role she left for me: executor of her estate. A role she named for me again and again over the years, shaping my understanding of it without my fully realizing what she was doing. Now I feel the tension of that responsibility pressed against the tender, unsteady ground of grief. I do not know what others expect of me. I do not know where conflict might surface. I only know that she trusted me and that trust brings both steadiness and fear. Seneca wrote that “We suffer more in imagination than in reality,” but imagination is powerful, and grief amplifies its reach. Even so, I remind myself that the inheritance that matters, the inheritance she already gave me, is not a list of objects or accounts. It is time. The afternoons spent together, the picture she knew I wanted to take on "Date Nights," the conversations where we shaped meaning from the ordinary. As Shakespeare wrote, “That which we have we prize not to the worth, whiles we enjoy it.” Only now do I understand the worth.
And then there is the house on Regan Ave. A place I have spent more of my life in than anywhere else. It is not simply my grandparents’ home; it is the primary architectural constant of my existence. My parents lived in the basement here when they were newly married. My father grew up in these rooms. My aunt lived her life in its orbit. And I began my own life here, before memory had even taken root. This house is not just a dwelling, it is a multigenerational mirror, a layered palimpsest of all the lives that passed through it. William James once wrote, “Every man is the sum of all his ancestors,” and nowhere is that truer than in this house. Its walls contain the echo of every voice that shaped me, and its floors hold the imprint of every step that led me to this moment.
As I move through its rooms now, I see ordinary objects transformed into intimate artifacts. The couch from my great-grandmother’s house. Thirty-year-old recliners in their unchanging positions. A mattress I carried home from a store that no longer exists. A kitchen table etched with decades of meals, arguments, celebrations, retreats. And an iron skillet, worn so thin I am still unsure how she used it, but she did. These objects feel less like things and more like repositories. They hold traces of the people who touched them, the rituals they supported, the gestures repeated until they formed the grain of daily life. William Blake’s line rings true here: “The visible world is but the curtain of the unseen.” Behind every object is a shadow of meaning I am responsible for honoring.
Yet the executor’s task demands that I turn this tapestry into distributable parts. A life once whole must be parsed into fragments. What was unified must be divided. It is an unraveling, and I am charged with doing it with fairness and care. “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” says Matthew’s Gospel, and as I sort through the belongings of my grandmother’s life, I understand that the treasure is not the objects themselves, but the stories and relationships woven around them.
In this emotional terrain, Delvaux’s Pygmalion becomes a mirror. The central woman touching the marble statue holds its face with a tenderness that is not naïve but resolute. She knows it will not answer. She touches it anyway. The gesture itself is the meaning. Saint-Exupéry wrote, “What is essential is invisible to the eye,” and that is precisely what Delvaux captures: the quiet devotion of tending to what is no longer living. This, too, is the executor’s work. I hold objects that cannot speak, listen for stories that can no longer be told, try to make decisions faithful to what I know of her desires. I am leaning toward what is silent, trusting that the gesture matters.
The surrounding figures deepen this metaphor. The foliage-crowned woman, carrying a bloom too large for her scale, represents renewal moving through unfamiliar territory. New life, but not in recognizable forms. The man in black who turns away embodies another truth of grief: the instinct to withdraw, to avoid what feels unbearable. Ecclesiastes reminds us, “To everything there is a season… a time to break down, and a time to build up.” These figures inhabit different seasons, different coping strategies. So does my family. So do I.
But there is yet another layer, one drawn from psychology rather than art history. The Pygmalion effect: the phenomenon in which the expectations of others shape who we become. My grandmother believed I could be the executor long before I did. She sculpted me with her trust. She walked me through her home, telling the stories behind each object, as if inscribing notes into its margins. She affirmed my steadiness, my fairness, my clarity, until I began to see these traits in myself. But the truth is, she was not the only sculptor. My grandfather, my parents, my brother: all of them shaped me. François Mauriac observed, “We are molded and remolded by those who have loved us; and though their love may pass, we remain its work.” I am the work of many hands. The executor I am becoming is the culmination of their collective shaping.
To rise to this role now is to inhabit the person they spent decades forming. Aristotle’s adage, “We are what we repeatedly do,” speaks to this: the executor is not a sudden identity but the continuation of habits learned across a lifetime. The habits of care, responsibility, fairness, and love.
This is why I now understand that the true work of grief is stewardship. Not simply mourning, but carrying forward what remains with tenderness and clarity. Stewardship requires both emotional presence and emotional distance. It requires stepping into conflict gently and stepping out of it with integrity. Martha Washington wrote, “Happiness depends on our dispositions, not our circumstances,” and in this surreal landscape of after, my disposition becomes the moral compass guiding each decision I make.
And so I keep touching what cannot answer back, trusting that this, too, is a form of love. “Love never faileth,” says Corinthians, and perhaps that is why the executor’s work, though painful, is bearable: it is love transposed into action. Love rendered as fairness. Love rendered as care for the unraveled threads of a life.
Now, as I walk through the house on Regan Ave, my house as much as theirs, I feel the weight and the gift of every belief placed in me. A Chinese proverb reminds me, “Be not afraid of going slowly; be afraid only of standing still.” I move slowly through this altered world, guided by the generational faith that shaped me. I do not stand still, but I do move with slowly and with intent.
In the end, becoming the executor is less about legal authority and more about becoming the person they always believed I could be. Proverbs tells us, “Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” I follow those paths now, my grandma's paths, not because they are easy, but because they are hers. And because, in fulfilling the role she trusted me with, I honor every hand that sculpted the person I have become.