Lamplit

On a cool, windy October Saturday that also happened to be my birthday, my

grandmother died. The news hit me like a fist from the sky to wrest me to the cold cement of a

gas station in Hillsboro, North Dakota. I was trying to make it to see her. I didn’t make it to see

her. I sat on the ground next to my car while my brother’s voice came, tinny and choked, through

the phone in my hand. I thought I had more time.

The next week was all a sleepless, tear-soaked hometown blur. My old high school gym

coach stopped me at a gas station to ask if I had considered moving home. What he meant was,

have you considered that you may not have as much time as you think you do to share your love

with those you reserve it for? What he meant was that everyone is dying, flickering out. I wish I

could have told him that the flickering happens at any distance. I nodded, wiped my eyes, and

paid for my gas.

The divvying up of her things was efficient. She was organized to the end and our names

were clearly scrawled on masking tape on the possessions she was leaving. A necklace here, a

ceramic pot there. I was turning to stone, but the porous kind that water sinks into and back out

of. Water in, tears out. People poured their words of condolence in, and they rushed back out. I

couldn’t hold anything, much less the grief of others or their concern about the fist of mourning

that held me tight.

I went home after the funeral with a touch lamp and a crystal candy bowl that used to

hold lemon drops in my grandmother’s golden yellow kitchen. Touch lamps have been known to

have wiring issues. That’s what I would tell myself when, in the days and weeks and months that

followed, the touch lamp would catch my tear-filled eye from across the room as it turned on
with no input from the world outside. It was as if the lamp could sense my desolation and, in an

effort to ward off the darkness, would come to life with its warm glow.

The lamp became a comfort to me, a link to my lost grandmother in my time of need.

When I was alone, at the kitchen table, in the living room, staring into space, distraught about

this gaping, gasping hole in the cavern that my heart once fully inhabited, the light would turn

on, as if touched by a hand, a fingertip, a brush of energy from the ether. It was as if she was

there, her hand at the ready to remind me that she was not gone. Over time, the lamp turned on

by itself less and less as I worked through my grief and the fist’s grasp relaxed.

Some time after, I finally braved my hometown again. My father welcomed me to stay in

the creaking comfort of the house I grew up in. We talked about my grandmother, a topic we had

been avoiding for months. The sun went down while we sat on my grandmother’s old couch and

talked and didn’t talk and spent time in the parallel and silent existence of two people who are

sharing a deep sorrow, and in that silence, the lamp in the corner of his living room flickered to

life, washing the room in the familiar amber glow. My lamp was one of a set of two, and here

was the twin, and there she was to comfort us. My father squinted at the lamp and mumbled,

“that lamp turns on by itself all the time.”