Keep Smiling
It was as if Grant was there laughing with me. When it came to the one thing he wanted to say to me, he let me know. It's all good he was saying, ‘ I’ll take the shitty bathroom, you just keep smiling Janae.’
The posters from his funeral were recently resurrected from the cold dark tomb of the basement storage room. We called it the celebration of life then, but now I remember it all as the funeral. I can’t really think of celebrating a life gone from me.
Not that it wasn’t an amazing life of course, it just doesn't bring the feeling of celebration for me in any way. When I saw these posters after 3 years of hiding them away, I could actually look at them.
I’ve passed their hiding place many times but I don’t notice them. If I accidentally did, I made sure to look away as quickly as I could and to forget. So, when they were taken out of storage it was not by me. Grant’s parents came to visit.
They saw them peaking out of storage and were drawn to the pictures of their precious son. They wanted to see them and connect with the images, so out they came. My Mode of Operandi ignoring them was switched to not ignoring them.
Things that come up in life, whether I prefer them or not. I try to embrace each experience. I open myself to progress and find what I can learn. I take it in, to become better for and allow a new and better life because of my ability to accept, embrace and love all that is in my world.
Here came those pictures. The ones that some kind hearted soul printed up in those days just after death. They are all just a puzzle to me, filled with a hazy fog. Those days were scary in a way that reminds me I’m still alive.
I’m more alive now than that fog where I felt like a living person who was more dead than alive in the wake of death. So you can see why I passed them without looking at them for 3 years. However, I am in a year of acceptance.
What I have intended for this year, and probably the rest of my life is accepting all the losses, all the gains, and all that is going to come. All that will not be what I planned all those years ago. Now I’ll embrace the newness that is reality.
I’m committed to living my reality. So, out came the pictures and all the emotions that go with them. His parents simply doted over each one and wanted some to take home with them. I gave them whichever they wanted.
I knew they would be more positively meaningful to them than they would sitting in a storage closet here. That felt good, to send them to a place they would be cherished. I did say if they died, I wanted them back… but for now, I feel at peace parting with them.
They chose some beautiful ones. I looked at the ones left. The one of Grant on a toilet caught my attention. It brought a smile to my face and a chuckle that felt like a good laugh. A good memory, something to smile about.
With this, I opened up a little more to Grant with less of a broken heart and more of a smile. Then I had an idea! I opened up to putting some of these up in the house. I could cherish these too, in my way. I don’t have to be so adamantly forgetful of his past presence in our lives.
I’ve tried a little too much to block it all out just so I can exist now. Forgetting was more needed before. Now, I feel happy with myself and my life and all I’m working through and creating. The life I AM building without him.
Maybe, just maybe I can bring him back just a little and cherish that myself. Letting it in, again, doesn’t hurt quite so much anymore that makes me want to push away and run from the things that hurt. I have found more strength to face them.
I decided that Grant on the toilet contemplating explosions, was the perfect place to start. It was shitty of him to die, so I figured the bathroom would be an appropriate memorial for that photo. I laughed out loud when I came up with that one.
The feeling that it was the perfect segway into a little more holistic view of my lost beloved. Like it would help me bring back the things that give me reason to smile. Smiling is really what I want more of…
He was there. He was laughing with me. I felt it. Then I saw it. On the wall in the bathroom, I had 9 framed little sayings of positive reminders for inspiration during the shitty moments in the bathroom… haha. I proceeded to carefully remove each one.
It was a little sketchy with the glass as I pulled each on off, bending the glass just a little before the frame would give way and release from the wall. I had gotten about half of them down, all unbroken.
I got to the one that said “keep smiling.” It shattered coming off the wall much to my surprise. It was a dramatic shatter, far out of proportion to the angle and amount of force used. That’s when I knew that I didn’t break it. Grant did. He was smiling too.
Because I was smiling over the whole thing, he loved it. The moment I saw the broken glass and realized what the saying was on the only broken one, “keep smiling.” I felt the sweet little poke of jest from the unseen side of life that is surely there.
The joke and the love coming from a past life I once believed would be forever. He was letting me know that the smiling I want is the smiling he wants for me. I believe that and so I’ll keep smiling; even when things are shitty. I’ll remember Grant in the bathroom on the toilet. I’ll smile and remember to “keep smiling.”