Mariana had never seen her grandmother cry until the evening she found her standing at the kitchen window in the particular stillness of someone not looking at anything. She was eight. She had come in for a glass of water and found instead this: her grandmother, who was always doing something — folding, cooking, arranging, moving — completely still. Her hands were flat on the counter. She was looking at the window but not through it.
Mariana asked if she was alright. Her grandmother turned and said yes, she was fine, a smile appearing with the automatic precision of someone who had done it many times before. Mariana got her water. She sat at the kitchen table and drank it slowly, watching her grandmother begin to do things again — the folding, the arrangement — and she understood, in the wordless way children understand the things that matter, that the stillness was not fine. The stillness was something else.
She asked her mother later. Her mother was quiet for a moment in the way parents are quiet when they are deciding how much of the truth fits inside a child. She said: "Grandma had a brother who left when she was young. He went to France to work. He sent letters for a few years and then the letters stopped, and she never knew why." Mariana said: "Did he die?" Her mother said: "They never found out." Mariana thought about this. She thought about having a brother and then not having a brother, and not knowing which of those was true.
She went back to her grandmother the next day and sat beside her while she did the crossword, which was something they did together on Saturdays. She didn't say anything about the window or the stillness or the brother. She just sat there and answered the clues she knew, which wasn't many, and listened to the sound of her grandmother's pen on paper. Her grandmother put her arm around her at one point, not saying anything either. Mariana thought: she has been carrying this her whole life. The whole of her life, this absence, this not-knowing, beside all the other things. She carries it the way you carry something you have stopped noticing the weight of because it has been there so long.
She never spoke of it to her grandmother directly. Some things, she understood, are not for resolution. They are for witnessing. She witnessed it. She sat beside it on Saturdays with the crossword. That was its own kind of answer.
Some grief has no ending, only the people who sit beside it. Be one of those people.
