Grieving Season

A Note by Liv

I wrote Grieving Season to reflect on the death of my grandmother in March 2021. 

Written over the course of the last two years, Grieving Season is a creative nonfiction piece that takes the reader through several personal thoughts and experiences of mine that occurred from March to August 2021.  I reflect on her death, her memory, and the real work – to empty her house and reorientate myself in the world – that followed.

In the piece, I equate grief to a recurring time of year I have always hated: the month of March. In Sweden, where I grew up and where my grandmother lived after I had moved away, to Canada and Scotland, March was not Winter and not Spring. Caught between two seasons, you wondered when the sun and the warmth would come.

For me, bereavement was as though I was stranded between two other seasons, the “before” and the “after.” It was bleak. It was hard to trust that sunny days were on their way.

But lots, actually, happens inside our brain when we mourn losses. It works fervently to adapt to its new reality: a world without somebody you loved. In a way March rewires your world, too – it prepares it for Spring.

I hope that Grieving Season resonates with people who have experienced a loss, and that it contributes to the growing public conversation on death and loss. In my opinion, art communicates grief better than anything else. To talk about bereavement matters, as it will otherwise almost inevitably be isolating. 

Grieving Season

The month of March. Four weeks’ empty time, wedged between Winter and Spring. 

Further North, where the flowers bloom late, March does not resemble its namesake, the Roman war god Mars. Mars leaps into action, charges forward. Mars exudes power and vibrancy.

But here, when the soft snow goes, the ground revealed below seems less inspiring than stone. Colourless water falls on bare branches, soaks the grass on the lawn. No roots are dead, but all that matters to me – or so I would swear – is that they seem that way. March makes the World stop. 

All I wanted to do when March came was to stare out the window – waiting for the sun rays that lovely April hands me, and everything they would make happen. All the green returning to the flat Uppland plains, and the sudden blooming of blue anemones with yellow pistils once more colouring my grandmother’s garden.

Visiting my grandmother always came with some nervous anticipation. 

She was not my Mum, but the Grand Old Lady from long ago. 

Her eyes had seen tens of thousands of days. Her legs had walked one hundred thousand miles. 

She was parentless. She had no God. Her cat and her husband were gone. She had us, but she was on her own, alone in a way that the eldest branch to bloom on the tree, that watches down, can be alone. There was nobody above her. 

Her face, mature like elderly oak bark, seemed made from these experiences – each weather event had carved an irreversible line into her skin. 

For all who live, ageing does not ruin – it adds, like an artist painting in oil. Each time they sit by the easel, the artist adds new textures and colours, new translucent layers, on and on until the work is finished, and the eyes in the portrait are made to gently fall shut. 

My spine straightened itself when I rang the doorbell next to the polished brass plaque that was engraved with her nine-letter name. 

We were eight years old and eighty years old, pensioner and school child. A flowerbud, who wanted to bloom, and an elderly willow, who shrouds the young ones with her leaves. March dragged on by the window. 

I loved to listen to her tell me about the adventures she had had from the moment she, thirteen years old, jumped over the roundpole fences that surrounded her rural town. 

She left to go to school, and then to go abroad. 

She rode the motorcycle across England and Ireland, sent telegrams to her beau as he overwintered on Svalbard, learned other languages, petted elephant ears on the Kenyan savannah, and typed at her computer as long as she could. 

I saw little of The Illness. Malicious cancer had appeared for the third time, and The End was now Over There, Close, and Ever Nearer, approaching from the horizon with steady steps. Loud and constant, they were drums you cannot unhear.

She wanted to deny the end, but that task was cumbersome. An attempt to plough through frozen soil. She wanted to talk, to tell another story and another one – she was not done – before she understood – truly – that she was. 

There, in her hospice bed, she was going out like the tide to the ocean. I was abroad, grounded by the Covid pandemic, and never saw her there, but at night I imagined how her body had shrunken and become like a thread – the thinnest fibre on the spindle – that would snap at the slightest stretch. 

We sent messages, an Elephant between us, the fresh, young flower to the withering willow. Only the very last few I received were cryptic, made haphazardly from flurries of commas, dots, and irregular capital letters. 

In the middle of March, in the final weeks of social distancing, my grandmother died, and disappeared. I attended her funeral at the local church, via the technological wonder and hellhole of Zoom. 

Death, even when it comes quietly in a clean and calm hospice bed, is loud. 

Grief, too, makes thunderous noise. 

Its stubborn sound picks at you like the humming of an enraged mosquito right by your ear.

Early June. We, children and grandchildren, are in the home of somebody freshly dead. 

The space seems warm, lived in. Not clinically clean, but no real dust has gathered.

In spite of the Scandinavian fondness for death cleaning  – methodically disposing of your personal belongings, in anticipation of your own passing, so that your family can be spared this emotionally cumbersome task – my Scandinavian grandmother left nearly everything behind. 

Things, things, and more things, from floor to ceiling. An exhibit, really, on her eight long decades, preserved in stillness. 

The shiny brass pots hang solemnly on the kitchen wall. The plain Ikea bookshelf remains stacked with books. In the dining room drawers, an eclectic jewellery collection comprising statement necklaces and rings from decades of evolving fashion, reminding me of her aversion to Nordic minimalism. The computer, an old Apple one, her writing machine, a tool of communication and connection that she told me was her lifeline to the world. An object of vital importance throughout 2020, a year marred by personal and collective sickness. 

The summer goes on, but I hardly notice the roses, the apple tree, the woolly hedgenettle that are like touching lambs’ ears, the tall pine trees whose brown bark turns auburn when the evening sun hits them and illuminates their scraggly crowns.

I am at work. We have removed photographs, hundreds, probably, from the drawer and the cupboard. Piles – little mountains. Artworks mixed with impromptu personal documentation from vacations abroad and weekends at home. 

The instructions are simple – start at the bottom and you will travel through the life of somebody dead. It will be an exhilarating and frightening journey. I see a bittersweetness to the path, the one that begins with energy and warmth and presence, and ends when the body has run its course and enters the ground, when the lens can no longer find them anywhere at all. 

In the middle of a mountain emerges a portrait of her, and I suddenly peek into the full colour past of my grandmother. She peers at me through the lens with youthful optimism. Perky eyes and fresh white teeth. She looks just the way I feel, at times, when I take strides on my way somewhere, when I love the way my face looks in the mirror: as though she does not believe that she could ever age and pass away.

When you take care of a death, you need to efficiently make many practical decisions. A house needs to be sold. A space needs to be freed. The limited number of days fly by.

I remove sheets and frail white hairs from her hairbrush, ponder what photographs and books we should throw away, what to do with the Herbarium she made for school an age ago, and all the other lovely objects that were hers but not ours. You cannot keep them all. You should not keep them all.

Inside, I feel colourless and mute. I tune into my emotions to generate some opinion, so that I can propose some decisions, but I operate only with my head. 

At that moment, I thought that March, that dreaded month, feels so much like my bereavement.

Again, I am at the kitchen table, my chin in my hand, and I am staring out the window at dead nature, the garden caught between two seasons, but now without my grandmother in the opposite chair. 

August arrives, and the roses start dropping petals and scent. Soon they die, and the whole garden follows, without hesitation, folding itself into the ground in preparation for the coming snows.

The whole summer has passed, and I have missed the warm season. I was not here, not really – heavy work was done down some dark, underground mines when the sun reached the highest point in the sky and everybody else went for a swim. 

Our eyelids droop from the packing, the cleaning, and the grieving. 

When we have talked about her, I have wanted to look over my shoulder, wondering about a soul, some sort of floating consciousness, lingering behind after all, thinking she might be listening from somewhere, from around the corner and through the walls. The presence that people who have gone have. 

But with each item we have boxed up, she has slipped away some more, away from her desk, away from her bed, onto the local country church grounds, and into her grave.

March has almost passed. 

A year later, I learned that there are people who study bereavement science, working to map what happens to the brain when we grieve. 

I research them and understand that our relationships with human beings close to us – whether they be family or friends – change our brains by building neural connections. They make a mark, literally, in the physical tissue that holds our mind. We grow to expect them around us. 

But our attachments, and the neural connections they form, understand Death poorly. In fact, they do not even know that Death exists, and that Death is Permanent. 

Cognitively, rationally, however, we know that Death very much stays. That dissonance – when different parts of your brain disagree with one another – creates psychological and emotional chaos. It expects the person to be back soon – how can they not be? – but we know they can never be. 

Thankfully, our brain is an ingenious, changeable thing. When you mourn, your brain works to update those neural connections, to teach your thought patterns that you should no longer expect them to appear by the door or answer the phone. 

Grief withers our days, shrivels them, makes for a bleak season. It scares us by shrouding the ground that waits on the other side. 

But you are on a road to a new season. March blossoms as much as June and July – unseen change – Intangible, yes, and hard to fathom until you see the snowdrops, and then the daffodils, and at last, the roses that make you trust that you can now enjoy another summer.  

In April 2023, the grieving season passed. I miss her, and our conversations at the kitchen table. But when March comes again, I shall keep them close in my raincoat pocket.