Grief is the smell of her conditioner, discontinued.

For Eleanor Spears Farrington, my beloved grandmother.

I haven’t written in the past weeks because I haven’t known what to say. That’s not true, actually, I’ve said thousands of words about what’s been going on but I haven’t wanted to publish them yet. Grief is such a strange mirror. You see so many parts of yourself you’ve never seen before. Sometimes I feel like I’m vibrating, and pieces of me are floating into space. I’ve been trying to catch what I can. Some of the things I’m finding, I want to shout from the rooftops, and some parts of it feel so tender and terrifying that I can’t get the words out.

Instead of trying to encapsulate it perfectly, I thought I’d just sit down, say what I could, and press send. I know I don’t owe you anything, and I’d never pen anything until I’m ready. For now, I’m ready for this.

My grandmother, Eleanor Spears Farrington, died and was laid to rest last week. There is so much I want you to know about her and one day maybe I will tell it, but for now I am in the valley of grief, big time.

I am completely at a loss. As a long time devout woman of faith, and as a widow, my grandmother has been very ready to go for quite some time. We talked about it a lot actually. I always speculated that it was because I wasn’t phased by her talking about her passing, and naively thought that she wasn’t talking about it as often with my other family members. In her passing I found out I was wrong. She talked to all of us about it, and she wasn’t scared of the end, which is a beautiful way to leave this world. She and I have shared so many wonderful moments together, every one of which I feel glad for now. Even in her dying we shared some beautiful moments.

In her absence I have craved her. I’ve been bewitched by the idea of calling her. To be honest, I have called her. I’ve rang her number and waited to hear her answer on her answering machine just to hear her voice again, though I’ve been too scared to leave her any messages. In writing this, I just tried to dial her again and the number has been disconnected. I’ve known her phone number my entire life, it is the only number I know by heart other than my own and my husband's. The grief just piles up when you lose someone you love, doesn’t it?

I’ve always been moved by the idea of wind telephones, but they’ve never made as much sense to me as they do now, with her line cut. I look forward to visiting the one I see when I’m driving to the park to walk in Nashville, and dialing her number once again.

I’ve mourned her in the big ways you might have imagined, yes. I’ve screamed, I’ve cried, I’ve gotten a tattoo of her name in her handwriting. I’ve begged God to send her back to me somehow.

In this grief I have been trying to stay present and curious even if it feels like it might swallow me whole.

This week, it’s been interesting to see the ways I’ve searched for her. I look back at the photos of her recipes that I took on the last day my grandma was alive. In these photos I can feel her. There’s something about them that feels alive, maybe because I could make them, and call a piece of her back to me through her chicken casserole or her fudge.

I’ve also been desperately searching for the smell of a conditioner she used when I was growing up. She had this St. Ives Shampoo and Conditioner and she used to wash my hair with it when I was a little girl, sleeping over at her house. The shampoo was bright pink, and the conditioner was milky. It was always so special to me because it was her hair stuff, and also because it made me smell like her. When I opened her shower after her passing, I expected to see it there somehow, even though it was discontinued a while ago.

I hope I find her everywhere for the rest of my life, even if it makes me cry. The grief is so massive because the love I had for her, and the love she had for me was immense.

On a walk today I listened to the Plains song I Walked With You a Ways and it unraveled me.

I cried, of course, because I was so deeply sad and scared and because I missed my grandma and because I don’t know how to navigate the world without her being a phone call away.

I cried because her phone number is disconnected and I probably won’t ever hear the message on her answering machine again and soon 838-4747 will belong to someone else.

I cried because her conditioner has been discontinued and even though I’ll probably smell something like it I’ll never smell it again.

I also cried because in some small way, I felt found because someone somewhere had felt a similar kind of alone and found their way through it enough to write something down.

“On the winding path of life
Sometimes you walk alone
'Cause people come and go
There is a season for each one
They change your heart, and then it's done
Well I'll be better all my days
'Cause I walked with you a ways
I walked with you a ways

There always is a last time for anything you do
We don't notice in the moment
You'll know after it's through
My back is to the sunset
'Cause I wanna see your face
Glow in the light at the end of the day
Glow in the light, I'll think of you that way”

On that same walk I smelled cedar in the air, and she was with me again in my memory, pulling my Aunt Wendy’s toys out of a wooden chest for me to play with.