I wonder who we would be right now if the world hadn’t shifted so suddenly 2 years ago?

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When my Grandpa died over two decades ago, I was quite little and had never met death before, but my bones felt him leave.

I remember sitting on the living room couch and hugging a pillow to my chest, my frame not knowing where else to go but there.

If I close my eyes real tight, I see his weathered face: a smile that turned on the festival lights of his eyes and ears lifting with them.

Sometimes I think he’s here with me, watching me write, perhaps puffing on his cigar and marveling at how a granddaughter like his could be so damn special, like grandpas in my dreams always do.

My bones remember: the curled position they took on the couch that day we left him in the ground, the embrace of the pillow, the way my skull turned upward to the photo hanging on the wall of my parents’ wedding day — his weathered, smiling face framed forever in my mind.

My bones remind me: how to heal, how to collapse and contain, how to collide and connect.

My bones curl me up now, on the couch on Clinton Ave; my bones wrap my arms around my torso for a hug; my bones tell the story of where I’ve been and how I’ve grown.

We are resilient because we’ve met grief — we feel it in your bones.

The world shifts and our bones remember what to do with grief — and then they grow to hold us: Wether that is upright and tall or slouched and curled inward. Our bones hold us.

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(I wrote this a year ago and it still seems applicable today, at 2 years)