The End of the World

on my first trip back to japan in seven years, my grandmother returned from the dead. she was wandering around the plane, which she wasn’t supposed to be on.

are you my granddaughter? she asked. her face looked like it was barely clinging to its frame. my face, too, suddenly felt similar. then as a statement: you are my granddaughter.

on a plane, everything continues as a long, smooth line, cold and blue and sterile. and so i watched my grandmother traveling up and down the aisles, continuing an eternal and unreachable journey to win back my love each time she arrived back at my seat.

it feels unbelievable even now. but it also makes complete sense. at eight years old, she’d once said these words to me: “when i die, i’ll haunt you to make sure you’re being good.”

love is never being outside of god’s grace, and in my grandmother’s world, she is god, and her grace is never allowing me any other option but to know her.

*

i traveled to hiroshima from tokyo a day earlier than i had originally planned. i’d received a call from our family friends — she was at the hotel, which she’d remembered to book as always. but she kept remembering that something was wrong. she’d wake up and run to the police station to tell them i wasn’t there. and then she would be assured i was coming and get taken back to the hotel.

the thing was, i hadn’t been planning on going anywhere. i’d really only come to see my friends, and to go to my childhood best friend’s wedding. a big part of this trip, too, was to be able to mourn my grandmother in full, before she was gone. i haven’t spoken to her except as necessary in years. i’d imagined that this would be a way to revisit the places we’d been to together, to carry with me some version of her that felt safe for me to be around.

i was bitter and furious and horrified, especially because i was staying with a new friend in tokyo who i’d been introduced to through another friend of mine. i remember having to try and explain to her why an 86 year old woman would feel compelled to do this, that it wasn’t just sentimentality or unraveling memory — though it was both of those things, too — that this was a continuation of a long history that i’d once imagined never being able to escape from. thankfully, my friend understood. “you don’t have to go,” she said. i tried to see if anyone else could try taking care of her until i’d be able to go, maybe a couple of days later, but everyone was busy. i booked the shinkansen ticket for the next day.

i couldn’t stop crying when i came to the front desk. one of the workers did remember me, from all those years before. he politely looked down at the desk as i wept and asked for her room number. how can i explain it? i wanted to tell them that i was incredibly sad, but i also wanted them to understand the depth of my sadness. in their eyes, i was probably a selfish grandchild who’d abandoned their grandmother and hadn’t even come to see her until she’d been there for four days. but i’ve long understood that there is no point in trying to convince people of seeing something that they are unwilling to see.

her hotel room was dirty. notebooks and clothes and pens and makeup and small boxes of chocolates that she’d brought were scattered everywhere. grandma, are you okay? i’m so sorry you’ve been lonely. i love you, it’s me. i probably said something along those lines.

“where are we?” she kept asking me. and, “why did you leave me?”

i said, hiroshima. have you been okay? have you gone outside?

“no,” she’d say. then, suddenly, “but look at those beautiful lights. i’m so glad i came.”

outside, it was snowing. my grandmother was wearing a white bathrobe and had taken a 13-hour flight to stay in a hotel in a city she’d grown up in and now didn’t recognize. we sat and looked out of the window together. by the shopping center, reindeer and boxes of presents and candy canes twinkled in the dark, framing the words: MERRY XMAS, HIROSHIMA CITY, 2024.

we spent the night this way. many dementia patients experience what is called sometimes unaccurately hallucinations, but ar emore realistically just mistaken identification. a black rug is a dark hole threatening to pull them inside. my grandmother kept finding bugs on her comforter and trying to drown them with water drawn from the sink. it’s just lint, i tried to tell her; softly at first, then so frustrated i was yelling. it’s lint. i wanted more than anything for that woman to return, the one so sure of herself, the one who, even when experiencing something like fear, would never let it show. but that woman will never return, and even if she did, it would never be the one capable of truly loving me.

*

all my life i have been searching for the love that was deprived of me since i was a child — a love capable of nothing but honesty, respect; a love that nurtures but founds itself upon perseverance, not to be mistaken with obsession. and the older i am the more i recognize that such a love cannot exist, at least not in its idealized form, though i have experienced love that strives to be so. i am capable of receiving it and returning this kind of love, evidenced by one relationship, and then a relationship that tore itself apart in the worst of ways, in which we were the worst of ourselves — though now it has rekindled itself into a different kind of patience and loyalty toward one another.

i find myself wondering, though, why if someone should invite me into a deep, dark hole, i will follow, even if it means cutting off my limbs to do so. even while begging for my limbs to be cut off to do so, if only it means that they might look at me and declare me worthy for my suffering. who will claim me? who will see the lengths i go to for recognition of my worth, of the objective truth that i am a human being?

to see and to know, to grasp at some part of a person which they wish to hide and tell them you accept it, is sometimes viewed as threat. because if you see enough, if you love a person in their human imperfection, you become imperfect in their eyes to an unforgivable degree.

to say that i am to some degree not the same would be dishonest. should someone passing by could not see me in the hole, and therefore could not witness me, i would see this as a wound. but if they should glance inside and see me, i’d also too ashamed to let them. i’d cover myself with the night. these are my truths: that i am a co-creator of my own ending.

*

on the day before we left to go back to america, the day that was meant to be the first day of remembering that the person who i’d known as “grandmother” was dead, really and truly this time, i went to go fetch my dead grandmother from the hotel. and i am not done writing the story of this event, i am working on a novel now in which i will again try to witness the unwitnessable, the tragedies i most wish to flee.

i felt so horrible at the fact that i couldn’t take her to toyohira, where she grew up and where so many of my childhood memories still lie.im ready, i said — the trees were stalking the path, the city was stalking the trees, i was stalking these memories that weren’t even mine. the large arch was still up for christmas, the bulbs lighting up my brain — as if beauty couldn’t exist in this world where reality no longer cared about abiding by facts. 

she was standing outside, no confusion about her. she looked at me and smiled and i felt like she grew two inches taller, like her cheeks regained flesh, i saw her raise the bones of the living. i asked, where are we going? toyohira, she said. call the taxi. i knew in that moment that she had the same curse that i’ve had inside of me since the day i was born: happiness, beauty, love, all of those things are momentary. they are large feelings that eclipse everything when they occur, but they’re not things you’re allowed to hold onto, meaning, you force them to happen on a whim, to erupt and then to return to what you know is the true eternal: unabated suffering.

thus my grandma is cluttering the world with her, and she still won’t let it leave, continues now. back at home she is unraveling even further and my mother too, and how can i hold all of it. how can i not see a woman so fearful of the world that she can only exist in it by controlling it, and not worry that i will eventually become the same?

but i am not doomed to this same fate, i remind myself. even as i sit here, back inside of a place that i’d never thought to return to again, where i am all but dead inside, wishing desperately for my life to end. but my will to live is stronger than my will to die; i’ve proven it to myself over and over again, through the years. and one day i will come to love the part of myself that refuses to give into the dark, that refuses to recognize love as momentary: i see the end of the world and begin a new day.