Kristin Noelle: Learning a new way to see
I loved my grandma, and love her still. I knew her for eleven years, but that was long enough for her love to get inside of me and stay there, to be a kind of spring I still return to. I feel held in the web of my ancestry by her and by my grandpa, their kindnesses an encircling softness that joins with other loves to challenge my fears that life is dark and rough and lonely and cold. I love it that she lives inside of me, too–in my genes, in my memories, in the habits and phrases that got passed down to me from her.
In 1987 I began a lesson that will surely last a lifetime, of learning how light changes when someone you love dies. How their light can feel completely gone, like my eleven-year-old self sitting in all that darkness, watching a different light than I had ever known reveal the world in harsher hues. Death is a fluorescent bulb sometimes, chasing away the subtleties, the filters, the mists that often hide the things we don’t want to see: unanticipated darknesses, dads weeping, beloved things getting taken away.
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