Everyone grieves in different ways— it’s funny the different things people remember. For some, 

time seems to slow down. Every little moment, every breath, is captured, caught in amber. For 

others, the date is unforgettable: they come apart on anniversaries. Me, I’m terrible with dates. 

My memories are imperfect, a kaleidoscope of details taken out of context. But I can remember 

times. So: April 16th, 2020, at 12:32 am. April 16th is not important, but 12:32 is, at least to me, 

in my experience of grief.

If I want to find out the date my grandmother died, I have to look it up, to search back

through the pages and pages of poetry I’ve written to find the poems I wrote at the time. Or

more accurately the poems I didn’t write, since they barely count as poetry. Just disconnected

images, some of which I have already forgotten. I have preserved these monuments to my grief— this 

makes it manageable. Every time I look back through the poetry I remember. I have to.

12:32. It’s a good time of day, a bad time of night. It hits right in the middle of day, when the 

sun is highest. Most people are in bed by the time it comes around again, knowing they’ll have 

to get up for school or for work, following the rhythms of daily life. If you are awake at 12:32, you’re 

an insomniac, or a college student, something out of the norm, someone waiting, caught in limbo. 

We were awake at 12:32, waiting for the call from the nursing home that we didn’t want to believe 

was coming.

I should explain the we: me, my aunt, my sister, my cousin. My cousin is my aunt’s daughter, 

adopted from Russia before my sister and I came to live with our aunt and our grandmother. 

My aunt is my mother’s sister and my grandmother’s daughter. My grandmother and my aunt 

were like parents to me and my sister; my grandmother lived with my aunt to help her take care

 of the children. My sister for a while wanted to call Auntie her mother, but I told her not to: 

it felt like an erasure, something instead of the truth. Anyway, my sister was asleep when the 

call came. I didn’t wake her up. Here the story fractures: it is all of us together and each of us apart.

We all lived together, me, my sister, my aunt, my cousin, and my grandmother, in the white 

clapboard house my grandmother’s grandparents had built the year the Titanic sunk. It is the 

oldest house in our neighborhood, the house my aunt grew up in: she used to have my room, 

but it was painted orange then, and my room is blue. Because it’s so old, I often felt rooted to 

history, like our family’s story was always in the house with us, always available to me. Like a 

palimpsest, my memories atop Auntie’s, atop Grandma’s endless stories. For example: the town 

property next to our house, which we insistently call the ‘town property’, as though it is a 

discrete thing and not an arbitrary selection of space. I used to kick soccer balls into it. My 

aunt wanted to fix it up. My grandmother’s family owned it, until our cousin, the one who laid 

down in the restaurant screaming for attention one Thanksgiving, stopped paying the taxes 

and the town claimed it, so we have no real connection to it anymore. Still, it is always 

there, just next door. Or that’s the way we tell the story: maybe it was never our property at all.

Anyway, my grandmother lived with us up until–here the timeline escapes me–what

must have been a year or so before she died. She went to— we sent her to— a nursing home, a

place called the Enclave in Rye. To get to my cousin’s dance studio, you have to drive past it.

The Enclave is right next to a cemetery. I thought this was morbidly hilarious.

She’d been in the Enclave once before, and was released, and then sent back. I don’t

remember the precise chronology: instead, a selection of unpleasant incidents— falls, 

ambulances, panicked phone calls, watching five minutes of a Marvel movie on the hospital TV.

She had a urinary tract infection, which I used to think was something that happened to 

children. Actually when it happens to old people it makes them hallucinate. I wrote a poem 

about her hallucinations once, possibly to cope with it or possibly because some of the 

hallucinations were so bizarre I wanted to remember them. For example, she used to hear 

a voice in her head constantly repeating the words “John McCain, John McCain”, and on 

one occasion somehow came to believe that John McCain had had a baby with Hillary Clinton. 

Maybe that was only a dream she had, I don’t know, but it was the sort of thing that might 

have come from her mind.

When we gave her chocolate chip cookies, she thought the chips were sunflower seeds, and 

they were poisoning her. It was funny and sad at the same time. Then it was only sad, because 

she was dead, and everything that had ever happened seemed to lead her and us on an 

inexorable path to her dying.

Looking back, we could see the signs if we cared to look for greater mental instability, 

before the urinary tract infection. Memories took on a greater significance. “Go look at the 

cat, Joanna,” she said, when I was much younger. She was looking out the window of her 

room, filled as it was with the detritus of her history (old clothes, mementoes, dust), pointing 

past the air conditioner our contractor had probably installed improperly. Her face folded 

in wrinkles like the pleats of a skirt she might have worn as a girl. She probably hadn’t bothered 

to color her hair so it was dishwater grey and hanging down her face like string. “Look, there’s 

a cat on the town property.”

Her voice grew ever louder, summoning the rest of the family. My aunt, my sister, my

cousin, all clustered around, squeezing into her room. “Don’t you see the cat?” We peered out

the window. Maybe the air conditioner was blocking our view. “Go out and look at the cat.”

I went outside, stood in the street staring into the town property. The town doesn’t care for it–it’s

a little slice of wilderness. I saw branches, dead leaves, trees looming over our house. I didn’t

see a cat, only a plastic garbage bag, waving in the wind.

“There’s a garbage bag,” I said. “Maybe that’s what you saw.” Of course, now it looks like she 

was losing it already, even then. Sometimes I look into the town property and see a plastic bag 

and remember, again, the cat that never was.

“I’m glad she’s in the nursing home now,” my aunt said at the time we put her in there. “It’s so 

much better with her gone.” We were driving home, back to our house. Leaving my grandmother 

behind in the Enclave with its drab grey exterior, the fake fireplaces in the visitor’s room, the TV 

constantly on in the common room, the food that looked as if it ought to smell wrong, the population 

of people who made my grandmother look perfectly sane. I looked out the window and saw the cemetery.

“Yeah,” I said, sitting now in the front seat of the car, which meant my cousin couldn’t

punch me in the backseat as used to happen when we all travelled together as a family. “I

know.”

My grandmother could be difficult, when she wasn’t crazy. No, she was difficult. It is easy to sanitize her 

now, but there were so many nights I turned up the music so I couldn’t hear her and my aunt 

screaming at each other.

“I’m selling the house,” she would threaten, when things got bad. In that creaky voice of hers like 

footsteps on the stairs in the dark. She sounded like a different person. “You don’t take care of me.” That was 

when I would cry. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to leave that shared history behind. I had 

a house and a history and what came with it was a symphony of screaming, arguments late into the night.

At the nursing home, though, we could leave. We did leave. There was a short list, growing ever shorter, 

of things we could talk about with her that wouldn’t erupt into an argument or a delusion. By this point

she couldn’t hear well. We would write questions on a purple whiteboard that had originally been bought 

for me to put in my middle school locker, but I gave up on the idea of decorating my locker and so the 

whiteboard languished until being repurposed for visits to Grandma. I would ask her endless questions 

about her childhood, people she knew, distant family members, her career as a teacher. She told the 

same stories again and again. But telling them seemed to give her life, and she clearly wanted us to visit, so I asked.

“Didn’t you and Auntie used to go to Thanksgiving with the cousin who owned the town property, 

until she lay down on the ground in the restaurant screaming for attention?” I would write with the 

slowly dying whiteboard marker, because I already knew the answer, how the story ended. Then she 

could start talking— that got a good fifteen minutes gone— and I slunk to

the corner to squat above the mysteriously sticky floor and read other people’s stories on my phone.

I liked her stories, though, about the house, the people that had once lived there, even her. I had the 

idea of writing down her stories, so I would remember them when she was gone, but I never got 

around to it. Secretly, I didn’t believe she would ever die.

She died only a few months into the Covid-19 pandemic. My aunt says this is lucky. Had she went 

without us visiting for so long she surely would have been miserable. How would she have coped 

with Zoom calls, since she couldn’t hear?

There was one Zoom call that I remember. It was the last one. The nursing home told us to say 

goodbye. She was hooked up to some sort of mask, clearly struggling to breathe. I didn’t want to see her 

face like that. My cousin was dancing around doing a TikTok in the background, yelling at me 

and my sister and my aunt for crying. I guess that’s how she grieved, but I find that difficult to forgive.

We don’t know for sure if she died of Covid— there wasn’t enough time for a test, or enough 

tests. Circumstantial evidence might not be enough to convict the virus, but it sure looks guilty, 

and perhaps that is what matters. I tell people my grandmother died of Covid, like I’m putting 

myself into the long sweep of history. It’s easier than to explain that they didn’t think it was 

worth putting her through a test when they already knew what the answer (probably) was: that 

there wasn’t enough time, she was already dead even as she fought to breathe. 

I had been in my writing class, writing, ironically enough, a memoir. Then I heard in the back 

of my mind— like a little hallucinatory voice saying “John McCain’— my aunt’s voice on 

the phone. I wanted to believe it was a nightmare, that my imagination had somehow become 

reality, but the words grew ever louder, more solid. I pretended not to hear, but my stomach 

had dropped to somewhere around Antarctica. I couldn’t ignore what was happening, in 

another room, in another town.

“We think she has Covid,” the nursing home was saying. “She doesn’t have long. We can set 

up a call to say goodbye.” Or they must have been saying. I heard my aunt louder. She was 

crying, crying a way I hadn’t known she could cry. That’s how I knew it was serious.

“I’m having a family emergency,” I told my writing teacher over Zoom. I closed my computer 

and went downstairs and my aunt told me that my grandmother was dying.

The next morning I must have slept, after that midnight vigil that had ended with the nursing 

home telling us, “she died at around 12:32”. I don’t remember it. Instead I called what I was 

feeling ‘numb’. I tried to think about anything, everything, else, recognizing this process in 

my mind even as I underwent it. I tried to turn my grief into poetry. I put on the saddest music 

I knew, hoping it would help me cry.

I wanted to cry. I wanted the world to stop turning. I wanted there to be some visible sign to 

show my loss. I was furious at the fact that our ordinary lives still took place. I was afraid that

if I did not grieve enough, in the right way, I hadn’t truly loved her. You don’t take care of 

me. I cringed at the thought of all the times I had let her stories turn into background noise.

It snowed, not long after my grandmother died, even though it was April. “It’s a sign,” 

my aunt said, pointing at the snow through the same windows my grandmother had once 

scanned for a cat. “It means she went to Heaven. It snowed when my father died, too.” Her 

father had died when she was five. My grandmother hardly talked about him. I thought my 

aunt must be misremembering, making signs out of nothing. I don’t believe in Heaven, even 

though then I badly wanted to. I swallowed my doubts and let Auntie believe that snow was a 

sign from God that her mother had been accepted into heaven and reunited with her father–anything 

otherwise would have been cruel. People grieve in funny ways.

Every night, I would fixate on the time. 12:32. It still rings like a prayer through my mind 

today— that particular time, even during the daytime. When it was 12:32, in the months 

after, I would let myself be seized by a wave of grief, finally feeling that my grieving meant something,

that my feelings were real. I remembered the obliterating knowledge of her stories lost while 

I wasn’t listening. Sometimes, I would try to go to bed early, others I would stay up late but look 

away from the clock when 12:31 came around, hoping I could avoid the fatal time. But that still 

made me think about her, the spaces she left. The things I miss and the things I don’t.

Sometimes, a certain kind of night, I still do. Sometimes, I can almost tell the story.