Still Telling the Truth

The Things We Carry

This week I've been thinking about my great aunt.

She's the only person in my family who ever made me feel like I truly knew where I came from.

My aunt was different.

She told the truth.

She was the first person to tell me what actually happened when my grandparents, very close to divorcing, adopted two girls.

How it was my grandmother's attempt to save the marriage.

She talked about things nobody else talked about.

She filled in gaps I didn't even know existed.

She helped me understand my family.

And in doing so, she helped me understand myself.

A few days ago, I arrived in New York and almost immediately received a message that she had been placed on hospice care.

For a moment, I considered turning around.

I was sitting in the back of a car leaving LaGuardia and briefly thought about asking the driver to take me back to the airport.

But I didn't.

I had work to do. And honestly, my aunt would have been furious if I abandoned the reason I'd gone to New York in the first place.

So I kept moving.

The first day was full.

Airports.

Subways.

Conversations.

Meetings.

New people.

Old friends.

The city itself.

New York has a way of making stillness feel optional.

There is always somewhere to go. Something to see. Someone to meet.

And if you aren't careful, movement itself begins to feel like purpose.

The day ended with Krishna Das performing kirtan at a church on the Upper West Side.

At one point he began singing Om Namah Shivaya.

And without warning, the thought of my aunt arrived.

It came like a surge of energy.

A sudden opening.

And before I knew it, tears were running down my face.

I sat there for a long time letting them come.

What struck me later wasn't that I had suddenly thought about her.

It was that I realized I'd been carrying her with me all day.

This is what I'd been feeling.

I just hadn't stopped moving long enough to notice it.

That realization has stayed with me.

Because I think most of us imagine our emotions as events.

Something happens.

Then we feel something.

But increasingly I wonder if the opposite is often true.

Maybe we're feeling things all the time.

Maybe the feeling arrives first.

And awareness arrives later.

Maybe grief doesn't suddenly appear.

Maybe it waits.

Patiently.

Quietly.

Carried beneath meetings and errands and obligations and distractions until something slows us down enough to recognize what's already there.

A song.

A sunset.

A church pew.

A moment of silence.

And suddenly we're not encountering the feeling.

We're discovering it.

I wonder how much of life works this way.

How much sadness.

How much joy.

How much gratitude.

How much love.

How much fear.

How much longing.

How much wonder.

All moving quietly beneath the surface while we rush from one thing to the next.

We tend to think we're avoiding our feelings.

But maybe most of the time we're simply outrunning our awareness of them.

Eventually life catches us.

Eventually we sit still long enough.

And then there they are.

Waiting.

A few days later I flew home.

From O'Hare I took a car directly to my aunt's house in Des Plaines.

During the flight I spent most of my time trying to prepare.

What would I say?

Should I bring up death?

Should I tell her I came straight from the airport?

Would that sound like I was worried she wouldn't still be here?

Do I acknowledge what's happening?

Or do I pretend everything is normal?

The more I prepared, the less prepared I felt.

My aunt is dying.

She knows she's dying.

I know she's dying.

We both know.

When I arrived, the room was quiet.

She was asleep.

A partially eaten banana rested on her chest.

She looked smaller than I remembered.

I sat beside her and waited for her to wake up.

And as I sat there, memories started moving through my mind.

All those lunches we'd planned over the years.

Half of them canceled because one of us was busy.

Usually both of us.

Neither of us ever took it personally.

We would simply reschedule and pick up where we left off.

And somehow, when she woke up, that's exactly what happened.

No grand speech.

No perfect words.

No dramatic moment.

Just two people continuing a conversation that had been unfolding for decades.

At one point, trying to lighten the mood, I asked her why she suddenly had hair again and I didn't.

They had stopped her chemotherapy a few weeks earlier.

She laughed.

A little later she looked at me and said:

"Well, that's what I'm doing. I'm dying."

There wasn't any fear in it.

No performance.

No attempt to soften the reality.

Just honesty.

The same honesty she'd always offered.

And as she sat there, I started seeing all of those versions of her at once.

The aunt from lunch.

The aunt telling family stories.

The aunt filling in missing pieces.

The aunt helping me understand where I came from.

The aunt who answered questions nobody else would answer.

The aunt who cared enough to tell the truth.

And it struck me that this may be one of the hardest parts of losing someone.

Not simply that they leave.

But that every person carries something unique.

A perspective.

A memory.

A way of seeing.

A piece of the family story.

A piece of our story.

And when they go, that particular way of seeing the world goes with them.

The stories remain.

The photographs remain.

The memories remain.

But the living source disappears.

Maybe that's why grief often begins before death.

Not because someone is gone.

But because we can already feel the shape of the absence that's coming.

We begin missing them while they're still sitting right in front of us.

And perhaps that's what happened in that church in New York.

I thought I was crying because my aunt might die.

Now I think I was crying because I was beginning to understand what she had given me.

Not answers.

Not certainty.

Not even family history.

Something deeper.

A sense of where I came from.

A thread connecting me to people and events that existed long before I arrived.

A reminder that none of us appear out of nowhere.

We are all part of a story already in progress.

And some people help us remember how to read it.