2010's best writer/ROUND 1/Abby

I hope this isn't too late! My computer has been messed up for a few days so I haven't been able to get on the net. If it's late I'm really sorry.

Remembering:

“Time to get up Kierah!” This request was from my mother, pulling my shades open and turning my radio on and there was nothing I wanted to do less then follow it.

I sighed and rolled over, burying my face in my pillow.  If only I didn’t have to get up this morning. I was not usually opposed to waking up at 7:00, as it was later than I woke up most days for school, but today was different. Today, getting up meant remembering, which was the thing I really dreaded, not the early rising. Remembering everything about the day that my grandmother died, from the moment I woke up, one year ago today, still dazed and rubbing my eyes, and heard the news, to the moment when they lowered the coffin into the ground and my grandmother had truly left the world forever.

Today was the day of grandma’s one year memorial mass at the church in Chicago where the funeral had been held just a few days after February 8^th 2009, her death date. Now, on the same date in 2010 I would have to ready myself, in the black sequined dress and flats that my mother was laying out on the bed that I still refused to get out of, to go sit in that same church and spend over an hour sitting in a hard wooden pew and trying not to cry.

I knew that it had been worse for my grandpa. While I had been sitting in my room, crying and yelling at my family to leave me alone, he had been sitting by himself, silent, because there was no longer anyone for him to tell to go away. While I had been struggling to pretend that everything was normal as I competed in my gymnastics meet later that day, he had been sitting and crying in a house that was suddenly too big for him. But I was still a little bit angry at him for making me do this. For making me get all dressed up and go to a mass of remembering things I didn’t want to remember.

The day of grandma’s funeral had been bitter cold. I was tired from the wake on previous day, where I had received countless pitying handshakes and glances, and I had been sick of everything. My greatest wish on that morning was to go home and forget, because funerals are always filled with the opposite. They are all about remembering and saying a few words when everyone knows that words just make things worse. Everything had gone by in a blur, and before I knew it the coffin was being lowered into the ground. I had cried myself out of tears by then, but I still managed to pull a few out of my red eyes. My grandpa had laid flowers on the newly turned soil and we left him alone to say his final goodbyes. It hurt so much inside.

Then I realized something as I remembered. As much as it had first hurt, the pain of my grandma’s loss was slowly going away, like a healing cut. Sure, remembering was like pulling off a band-aid from the cut; a small flash of pain, but it disappeared in an instant, and it’s sometimes good to feel a bit of pain. It makes you grateful for the days that remain pain free.

I sighed and finally rolled out of bed onto the soft carpet of my floor and began pulling on my dress, because sometimes, I thought, it’s good to remember.