What my grandmother taught me about living with grief

The orchid cactus was always there. Its leaves, to me, appear almost like dog ears from a distance, but a closer look shows curved edges and teensy spines.

Several years ago, my grandmother explained to me that the plant came from her aunt in Virginia. Most people call my grandmom Dolores Owens. Nieces and nephews call her Aunt Dee-Dee. The aunt who raised her, Martha Blakey, called her Puddin. They’re from Madison County, Virginia. My grandmother had been visiting Aunt Martha this one time in the 1960s, and her aunt gave her a cutting that she brought back to Philadelphia.

My grandmother remembers, as a young child in Banco, Virginia, her mother, Frances, nurturing and protecting her. Her mother died when she was around 6 and when her brother Frank was around 9. The doctor had diagnosed her with both tuberculosis and goiter that could end her life. When my great-grandmother transitioned, her husband had no intention of raising the kids, so Aunt Martha, a widow, adopted them. Aunt Martha brought them to her cabin in Dulaney Mountain’s hollow, and cared for them alongside her children, Hazel and Lester, with the help of her mother, Rose. Her uncle Jake lived there too some years, and Aunt Martha would find ways to stretch her deceased husband’s pension to feed them all.

My grandmother doesn’t remember the pain of losing her mother. At the funeral, she thought it looked like her mother was sleeping.

Aunt Martha became the parent that molded her. She left home after being the first in her family to graduate high school, as the secondary school in the region to admit Black students opened in 1948, when she was turning 14.

She left the mountains after graduation. She followed her brother Lester to Philadelphia. He took her to the center of City Hall and explained that Broad Street went north to south and that Market went east to west. Then he let her find her way.

My grandmother carries on the memories of so many through the stories. I didn’t know Aunt Martha. But like the plant that’s always been there, I’ve always known Aunt Martha.

“I want to keep them close to my heart. And I think that’s the only way you do that,” my grandmother explained. “I just think you have to hold onto those memories, whether they’re good or bad. They’re still part of your family. A part of who you are. A part of who we become.”

We’re living through an age where many of us are losing a number of people. I understand, thanks to therapy, that it’s okay to feel my own pain, not compare my pain to anyone else’s and grieve in the ways that I need. I’ve got fiftyleven self-care practices, but really though, my grandmother, in the way that she can look back and smile and think back on all of them, is my reminder to stay in the work.

My grandmother has lost many loved ones. She lost Aunt Martha to emphysema in 1983, she lost her brother Frank in a road accident in 1959, and her brother Lester to liver disease in 1987. Aunt Martha died two days before her 79th birthday. Frank had been 27. Lester had been 63.

She would lose her aunts and uncles. She would lose her father-in-law David Owens and her mother-in-law Catherine Rice. She would lose two nephews, Lester Jr. and Conrad, and Conrad’s son, Hakim Rahman. She would lose her niece Connie. And she lost my dad, Dean.

She lost cousins, friends who became family, the list goes on. Sometimes when I feel like my own grief could consume me, I think about how she’s survived losing them. I think about my elders, all my grandparents, who also survived incalculable grief.

Seeing the plant, and knowing that it goes back to the cabin where my grandmother grew up, and to the elder who raised her, makes me feel like I get to touch a piece of my great-grand-aunt’s world. My Aunt Martha’s world was always a real world to me, through stories my family never stopped telling. Before my dear Aunt Hazel died in 2009, my grandmother and she ensured that I knew the family who made them who they were.

“Western culture is largely grief avoidant — the focus for those grieving is to move on as quickly as possible as to not prolong how uncomfortable it makes those around them,” Nneka M. Okona, the author of Self-Care for Grief and The Little Book of Self-Healing, wrote in an email to The Inquirer. “Memory can be healing because it allows sacred presence with your grief. When we remember, when we share funny or heartwarming stories about those who have transitioned, we honor them. And we honor ourselves.”

“So, for as long as we are there,” Okona wrote, “gasping for air, trying to make sense of rearranging our lives around a profound loss, we remember.”

The pandemic, and the process of losing friends over the last two years, has given my grandmother more grief to work through. She wasn’t surprised that Black people have been disproportionately impacted.

“That’s nothing new,” she said. (Last year, the Marshall Project analyzed 2019 pre-pandemic data on mortality and found that one in five Black Americans die earlier than their white counterparts.) “That goes without saying, but I think at the same time, we who are aware of that, need to try as hard as we can to educate those people who don’t take it seriously.”

When my father died of kidney cancer, I was 15 years old. It’ll never not be painful that he’s not here. Like a quote my grandmother appreciates says, “Grief doesn’t end, it just changes.”

We had to learn, in our ways, that we couldn’t just carry on after losing him. We both still do cry at times. The advice my grandmother gives others is to hold onto the good, to the gratitude for the loved one’s life. That might not work for everyone. Even for me, sometimes, that just feels too hard. But my grandmother has shown me the benefit of telling our loved ones’ stories even when it hurts. It’s a chance to make sure another generation still knows them, too.

Holding onto recipes, obituaries, and loved one’s belongings reflect ways that Black people have honored the dead for centuries. To Naila Francis, a Philadelphia-based grief coach and death midwife at This Hallowed Wilderness, these traditions remind her of ancestral practices like making altars.

“I feel like in the Black community — not that I haven’t seen it in the white community and other populations as well — but there’s like a depth of ongoing spiritual connection with our deceased loved ones that makes it almost like a natural thing to reach for that heirloom to say, I’m going to tend to the plant, to say I’m going to always drink my coffee from this cup, or I’m going to do this practice because that’s what they always did,” said Francis, who founded Salt Trails, a Philadelphia artists-and-healers collective that holds space for community grief rituals, in 2021. “Just to engage our loved ones in a way that almost creates sort of a tangible presence for us or like a, you know, an energy we can really feel when we’re either holding or being with or doing whatever that thing is that brings them close to us.”

For a long time, my grandmother didn’t know that Aunt Martha’s cutting was an orchid cactus. Before, when it would bloom, she says, a gorgeous fragrance would flow through the house, smelling sweet, almost like honeysuckle.

The plant hasn’t bloomed in several years. She took it to a plant store to be repotted two years ago, hoping a soil change to drier mix would help, but to no avail. Still, the plant, while some branches droop, lives on, at least 57 years old. Even when it’s drooping, I can imagine my great-grand-aunt Martha smelling its fragrance.

I believe that the plant will see better days. Even with hardship, Aunt Martha’s plant can rest and grow toward one day blossoming again.

I believe the same for all of us, too.