I should first off thank all of you for your kind words, from people who I know digitally to people I know physically, to people I know very physically: thank you. The world is much better with all of you in it.

Update: My grandmother died this morning at 4:10. We went to her apartment, my entire family, and began moving things out. I want to wish that this was some woman who I didn't know very well - just an older one who we put in a home after her husband died. Instead, she remained as a grandmother who was always around, and that echoes now even in death. Today: her handwriting, small and slight and horizontal, was scrawled in the margins of books, written on post-it notes, and her womanly cursive made it easy to imagine it coming from the same woman who smiled back at me from her high school photo, the black and white a night blooming into white on her cheeks and the dimples that she had and that I now have. On the wall, a poem I wrote for her. On her desk, photos of my grandfather who died of Alzhiemers years before. It was a black and white photo of him and his variety store back in Clinton, Indiana. He's smiling at the camera with some other workers, the women in flowery dresses and horn-rimmed glasses. He's smiling and oblivious to the disease that will come roaring like a black freight train to collide in his 70's.

If I believed in an afterlife I could picture my grandfather standing up, dusting off his old slacks, and smiling at my grandma. Maybe he'd say "Finally." or perhaps be witty, but I'd imagine that he'd most likely take her into his arms for an anchient hug, the businessman who settled in Clinton with his strong jaw and soft eyes, holding onto the woman who would not stop living even as her body did. Bump into some constellations tonight, grandparents. Rattle some stars, waltz on the moon, and maybe when I have another sleepless night I'll greet you both at dawn, as you fade with the night and the sun burns the bottom of the clouds. Oh please, this is a world where everyone gets heaven, indeed. I know they would. Or, with a touch of whimsy, I could say that I know that they do.

We arrange the memorial service this morning and I find myself waiting for myself to finally break, to stop being some lightly-crackworked wall and let the seive seperate. I'm waiting for something else to happen now, but nothing's going to in the pervasive gloom that death blankets over everyone. For now, this family is a family with a death in it. We circle and rebuild but for now her books are in the living room, her items and her life somehow reduced to several cardboard boxes, but at the same time somehow singing from the walls, and always, always nestled in my memories that I do, at the very least, have. So comes the verb that should in theory be used in the past tense but in truth refuses to dress up as such:

love you, still.