they heave up the bed. transfer the body to the stretcher. it’s practiced, clinical, with surgical masks and surgical gloves. all black polyester, buttoned up, then down just a fraction, and here she is, was, and there’s a vulnerability about being broken down into a one-word conjunction during the final moments of life. because there’s language, and there’s tenses, and there’s the weight of saying is quite never being comparable to the weight of saying was. because the last time an is came out of my mouth, there was this: my Nanay, always in bed, sometimes close to non-verbal, but still there. a rhythm in the breathing, a heart beating 1, 2, in. 1, 2, out.
but then a two-letter verb becomes three and if is means alive, then was means a life.
language is strange because is it normal, that the heaviness of loss is expected to be condensed into a single verb? the tense slips and changes but all i can think about is standing in a morgue. all i can think about is the sound of a zipper, the six seconds that comes after, quick, quicker than it should have been, quick in a way that seems unfair because how is it that i know someone my whole life yet still feel lacking for time?
Nanay, i will miss you, not because you’re gone, but because you were hard not to miss even while you were still here. and i love you, of course, but that’s a given, for as long as i’ve been alive, though it doesn’t hurt to say it anyway.
so maybe grief is a conjunction, a was that’ll never return to form, but there’s some comfort in knowing that losing the present means earning the past, too. it isn’t about tenses, not exactly, more about how love can be fractured into the before-after, more about being split implies the existence of a whole, and thus being gone doesn’t necessitate the love disappearing as much as it is simply cleaved into two.
to grieve, then, is to see double, to exist in two worlds— one of memory, and one of love. (which is which, is entirely up to you.)
