Today I keep thinking about how my grandfather is dead.

Not in the soft, distant way. Not in the “he passed away” way people say when they are trying to keep death from putting its elbows on the table. Just: he is dead.

He is gone.

I will never call him again.

It keeps striking me like that. Out of nowhere. Like my brain keeps walking into the same locked door and acting shocked every time it does not open.

He only died two months ago.

Only.

As if two months is supposed to be enough time for death to become manageable. As if grief has a polite little calendar and should be packing up its things by now. It has not. It is still here. Sitting in my chest. Heavy. Unmoving. A stone I swallowed without meaning to.

I was there when he died.

I keep hearing his breathing.

The agonal breathing. That awful body-sound that means the person is already leaving but the body is still doing its terrible little job. I hate that I know that sound now. I hate that it lives in me. I hate that part of my memory is a room where he is still breathing like that and I am still there, waiting for the end to finish arriving.

He was so sedated he did not even know I was there.

I do not know what to do with that.

I was there, but not really with him. He was there, but not really with me. His body was in the room. Mine was too. The space between us was full of machines and medication and waiting and the horrible intimacy of death taking its time.

It took four hours.

Four hours of waiting for someone I loved to leave his body.

And I did not cry when he died.

I did not cry when it was happening. I did not cry afterward. The first time I cried was at the funeral, like my body finally found the door marked grief and kicked it open in public. Then after that, nothing again. Not nothing exactly. More like the grief went underground. Rooted itself somewhere under my ribs. Quiet, but not gone.

Today it rose up.

Maybe because everything else is changing too. Moving. Packing. Work. Medication. The new apartment getting closer. My life becoming boxes and lists and errands and little acts of survival. Maybe grief waits until the body is already tired and then steps out from behind the curtain like, hello, you forgot I was still here.

I asked the cards when this grief will leave me.

Four of Swords. Ace of Swords reversed. Ten of Pentacles.

Not now, then.

Not by force.

The Four of Swords feels like a dark quiet room, but not a cruel one. Rest. Recovery. Lying still because something inside me is still wounded, even if there is no visible blood. It says this grief is not something I can argue out of my body. It needs quiet. It needs time. It needs me to stop poking it with a stick just to prove I can still feel something.

The Ace of Swords reversed says there may not be a clean sentence yet.

Maybe that is part of what scares me. I want the sharp truth. I want the explanation. I want the grief to become something I can name cleanly and then put somewhere. But death does not always give clean language. Sometimes the truth is just a sound you wish you had never heard. Sometimes the truth is “he is dead” repeated over and over because the mind cannot make it mean what it means.

The Ten of Pentacles is the part that hurts differently.

Family. Legacy. The long line. The people before me. The house behind the house. The fact that grief is not only about one person being gone, but about the shape of the family changing around the empty place they left.

My grandfather is dead, and something in the family is permanently different now.

Even if everyone keeps going.

Even if dishes get washed.

Even if people go to work and answer texts and pack boxes and buy shampoo and act normal because the world has the audacity to keep requiring errands.

He is still gone.

I think the cards are saying the grief does not leave like an unwanted guest. It changes rooms. It becomes quieter. It becomes ancestry. It becomes memory that does not always cut on the way down. It becomes part of the house of me, somewhere near the old photographs and the names I still know how to say.

But it is not there yet.

Right now it is still raw. Still strange. Still the sound of his breathing. Still the thought that I will never call him again landing in my chest like a stone.

Maybe today is not about making grief leave.

Maybe today is about admitting it is here.

Not dressing it up. Not making it wise. Not forcing it into a lesson because I am uncomfortable with the fact that some things are just awful.

My grandfather died.

I was there.

It hurt in ways I did not know how to show.

It still hurts.

The moon is waxing crescent tonight, which feels almost rude. A little new light growing while I am sitting with something that feels like an ending. But maybe that is the point. Not rebirth. Not yet. Just a thin line of light in the dark. Enough to show that the room is still here.

I do not know when the grief will leave me.

Maybe it won’t.

Maybe it will become something I can carry without hearing that breathing every time I touch it.

Maybe rest is the first mercy.