Is my late grandmother still watching over me?

Poems and reflections on loss, love, and the power of memories

At the end of November, I will be having a surgery. I know that I will be in very good doctor's hands, and yet I feel anxious about it. I guess it's our human nature to worry. When I called my mum and told her about the surgery, her answer was, "You know what that day is, don't you?" Of course, I knew. It's the day my grandmother passed away a few years ago. A day marked with grief.

People believe in different things: in God, in the universe, in signs. I have my own beliefs too, and one of them is that when people die, they leave their energy behind. That energy is what keeps me going when nothing else is there to lean on.

Ahead of my surgery, I've been thinking a lot about my ancestors, the people I loved so deeply. They might have left us, but their presence is still so palpable, so real. And what's real anyway?

I was lucky in many ways. I was lucky to have had my grandparents in my life for many years. I was also lucky to be able to say goodbye to them. Lying in a bed in a sterile hospital room, entangled in tubes and needles, my grandma's last words to me were, "Keep writing." "Keep writing," she said and smiled, and she cried, and I did too. (I later wrote my second novel ARRIVAL, which was published in the UK by The Indigo Press in 2022, and I dedicated it to her, the person who kept me writing).

Since love is energy and energy is what makes people alive, my love for my grandmother keeps her alive for me. Today, her presence is strong, and although I'm still anxious about the surgery, I want to think about her love for me instead. I want to believe that she'll be keeping me safe, keeping me alive.

I'm sharing here a few poems that I wrote in the days just before and after my grandma died. Some of these, I haven't shared with anyone else, they remained unpublished, only kept in my notebook until now. I wrote the first one on my way back, on the plane, in that space up high over the clouds between two countries, two time zones, two realities. These were the hours when she was in between her life and death.

White, fluffy clouds are captured from a place. The sky above is a deep blue colour.

I returned to London, and a few days later, she passed away. But, she didn't leave us all at once; they never do. Our loved ones leave little by little. We find traces of them in the days and even months that follow: in the house they inhabited, in the bed still keeping the shape of their body, in the cup they used to drink tea from, in the flowers they planted in the garden earlier, in the strawberry jam they prepared for the winter, in the old-fashioned postcards they bought but never sent, in the coat, hanging on the wall in the corridor, still carrying their scent and reminding us of the fragility of human life.

I didn’t know how to process grief, or how to write about it. But since poetry bears ambivalence, since it bears the tension between the most difficult experiences and beauty, it became my tool for self-expression and the only way to stay with my feelings of sadness and despair in those initial moments. And those were the moments full of intense emotions, the moments that rob you of words, the moments when the void we feel consumes us and takes up all the space there is.

---

Here are the poems:

***

When Grandma passed, 
she didn’t depart all at once. 
She left slowly, little by little. 
She slipped away with the last pears 
she picked days before her death, 
with the slippers by the door 
that we didn’t dare touch 
until spring, 
with the last pinches of savoury, mint, 
marjoram, and St. John’s wort, 
secretly tucked into my rucksack, 
wrapped in a brown paper bag. 
With the last handfuls of macaroni 
she made for the grandkids 
last summer, out in the yard, 
with her gown still hanging 
in the hallway, 
heavy with the absence of her. 

Now and then, she would come back 
for a brief moment— 
with the fragrant geraniums in the garden 
she handed me the last time I saw her, 
with the grapevine, which bore fruit 
for the first time that autumn, 
with the Christmas bread recipe, 
handwritten on a piece of paper, folded 
in four, which I know 
like the back of my hand, 
yet I read each year, 
caressing the paper with my fingers, 
summoning memories of her 
with every piece of bread I tear… 
Only the empty house 
reminds us abruptly 
of how far she is 
from here. 


***

The silence
in the hospital room
lies resting on the bed,
nestled gently
in the folds of the sheets,
in the nurses’ quiet steps,
in the steady drip
of the IV,
in the light
of the fluorescent glow,
in the oxygen mask
and your faint, fragile breath—
so as not to startle
life away.


***

Your bones,
pushing through your thinning skin,
condense the space,
shrink it,
pressing on the soul
until, in the end,
there’s no room left
for it.

Thank you for staying with me through this; I know it might have been difficult to read. If you’ve grieved a loved one, I hope the poems have brought you some solace. Keep thinking of them, and keep them alive through your love and memories.

Until next time,

Nataliya x