Grief and Gratitude | Gabriel Westreich ’22

Grief and Gratitude

Gabriel Westreich ’22

It struck him immediately as he woke. With a slow, casual roll-over, James’s body shifted from the interior of his bed, which was against the wall, towards the other side, which exposed his view to the mirror parallel to his bed frame. “I don’t like what I see,” he thought. The image reflecting back at him showed a young man, of about 25, leaning on his right side with his left arm hanging loosely over his sheets. He dreaded the effort it would take him to pull back his sheets and swing his hurting feet to the ground. “Reality,” he thought, “is not where I want to be.”

James was a dreamer, or at least that’s what everybody told him. With his constant inability to stay focused, he often found himself drooling over his desk, thinking about what could be, and thinking about what life was and wasn’t. Every so often, he’d get shaken back to reality with the loud “THUD” that came from his boss dropping a massive stack of paperwork on his desk. “You’re doing it again!” his boss would yell. “Get outta lala land and get back to work!” He wondered why, oh so constantly, his life was the way it was.

As his senses came back to him more and more, he looked up to his left at the high right corner of his tiny studio apartment. The clock showed 10:30, yet he felt like it was nighttime. All of time had become dark like the night to him, and he trotted through each day without any enthusiasm or desire for anything. He swung his bleary, blood-shot gaze once more back to the mirror, and with that same left arm picked the fabric from his carpet piece by piece. Due to the weight of his body and gravity, he began to feel the tingling sensation go up from his pointer finger through his wrist, then to his elbow, finally reaching an abrupt stop at his shoulder, and it all felt numb. James lay there a while longer, until he thought of something that hadn’t crossed his mind for who knows how long. He got caught in a trance again, but this time his mental image cast a light on his surroundings, similar to the glow that comes with the warm, intoxicating display of daybreak on a warm spring morning. It engulfed his consciousness, and he felt what seemed like a live shudder go through his body, and he felt the tension and elasticity rush back to his muscles, only instants after his prolonged numbness. He was thinking of his mother.

Ever since she had gotten sick three years before this, and passed, James had made it his number one priority to stack his life with such work and distraction that he wouldn’t have the time to think of her. He didn’t want to fall into the dread and negativity of the grieving process, yet for some reason, on this morning, he felt that it was necessary. He knew she wasn’t with him anymore, but it didn’t matter to him. His memory raced back to all the times when he was a young boy and his mom would be waiting at the door for him with open arms, after a long day of school. “She was beautiful,” he thought, “and the most loving individual I ever knew.” He was staring at the dimmed ceiling light directly above his eyes at this moment, and the tipped brass of the light shell became blurry in his gaze as his peripheral vision clouded

with tears. He wasn’t tearing up out of sadness, though. He was crying because of how happy these memories were; these memories that he had left in the dust with the hopes of getting rid of them, because if his mom was no longer here, and he knew she wasn’t coming back, he thought it would make things easier.

He quickly remembered the box of old photos he had left on the upper shelf of his old oak desk drawer. Ignoring the effort it would take, which he thought of almost every morning when he would dread getting up, he bolted down his stairs and into his study. Swinging the drawer open with a staunch effort, he almost broke the wooden borders which held it in place. He grabbed the box and tossed it on the couch and then took a long, deep breath and reminded himself to slow down. Walking calmly over to the box, he opened it, and immediately the once cloudy-eyed gaze turned into a flood of tears. He looked over the box, and, as single droplets bounced off the shiny surface of the printed photos, he grabbed handful after handful of the photos he had of himself and his mom. While still crying, he began to laugh and smile, and the photos held such weight in his hands he would’ve struggled less to hold a log of wood. “You’re still with me, aren’t you?” he asked out loud. He looked up as if he could see her and began to smile wider and laugh with such happiness and joy that he felt like he was a child playing outside with his mom again. He came to realize that, even though his mother wasn’t present as a physical figure, he would never lose her and she would always be with him, and for that he felt tremendously grateful.