First Game of the Season Grief


I've not been a fan of football for quite some time.  As a child, I remember watching the Steelers play with my grandfather.  The game was always on during Thanksgiving dinner at my grandparents house.  My dad and my uncle would usually fall asleep on the floor, a result of a good, filling meal. I never usually paid much attention to it, but the sounds are imbedded in my memories deeply.  My grandfathers voice responding to a bad play, muffling the sound of the dishes clinking in the sink as my mom and grandmother would clean up.

In high school I got into it a little.  The boy I was dating and some of our friends at the time were pretty into it.  I remember a couple we spent time with; one was a serious 49er fan and her boyfriend was a die-hard Cowboys fan.  The year I graduated, the Cowboys defeated the Bills, and I remember watching it at their house, and falling asleep before it was over. I have a photo of me asleep against the edge of the couch.  I was wearing a pair of black jeans and a grey shirt that came with shoulder pads that I ripped out because I hated shoulder pads, but I loved the shirt.  I'm pretty sure the shirt is probably still in my mothers closet.

My mother kept everything.  We started going through her attic, and spent multiple occasions over the past couple years sorting through boxes that contained her history, mine, my cousins, my fathers, some of my uncles stuff, and so on and so on.  We would sit there reminiscing over the zip-up body suit she wore in her senior picture, the polyester pant suits that she and my dad wore during the 70's, the hand-made dress that she wore in her friends wedding, the outfit that I wore when she and my father brought me home from the hospital. The list goes on and on and is full of random things in addition to clothing.  Things that most people would never keep, but that I know I will laugh, or smirk, or cry upon retrieving when I go through it all again.

The empty spaces that exist in my life are many and take up the majority of my day.  The phone call I would receive every morning when she woke up, or the one that I would make to her if I didn't hear from her soon enough. There were a million phone calls throughout the day.  Ever since the tragedy with my grandmother, my mom and I would call each other all the time.  Living next to each other meant that there was worry if we didn't know where the other was, so I usually called her when I was heading home from work, or heading to craft night, and home from craft night, or home from a friends house, or taking the boys for ice cream, or running to the store for something.  I called her so often.  To bitch about someone that annoyed me.  Today, sitting at the first game of the season, I would have called her to tell her how they were winning 28-0 at half-time.  And then I would have called her after I left to tell her I was on my way home.

And now I sit here, listening to the karaoke going up at her house, waiting for her to sing.  Sean was riding his bike around earlier, as we were getting ready to leave, and he said to me he swore he heard grandmas voice up there, singing, and he rode up the hill, even though he knew she wouldn't be there. She always sang The End of the World, by Skeeter Davis, and I haven't been able to listen to it since she's been gone.  And probably never will without breaking down again.

I'm pretty sure that as much as I've loathed football and the wasteful consumerism involved in it for quite a while now, it's going to be something that helps to fill the emptiness and helps me to find something new to take the place of something that will never be again.  Because things change, and I am always the one who points that out.  I've sat on her porch with her many nights looking down across the road at the monstrous garage that was built by the people who moved into the trailer that Jeff, Joyce, and Jenny put in when I was just a kid. We talked about how much has changed around here. How much change my grandmother saw in her entire life here and how it must have felt to her, and I know how it felt to my mother, not being able to see the sunrise in the same way that she and my father built the house exactly in that spot for.

Change is hard, but it's inevitable, and I know I have to be like the river.

But it's fucking hard.  And I know that eventually it will be less hard.  But for now, it's fucking hard.

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