The Week My Body Remembered Before My Mind Did

Last week, I started missing my Nana badly.

Not in the abstract way you sometimes miss people after enough time has passed. Not as a passing thought or a soft ache in the background. I mean badly. The kind of missing that sneaks into quiet moments and sits beside you. The kind where memories suddenly feel close enough to touch.

I found myself thinking about her constantly. Her voice. Her humor. Her magic. I kept wondering why it felt so sharp all of a sudden.

Then today I realized something I somehow had not consciously connected: Exactly one week ago was the fourth anniversary of her death.

And something about that realization stopped me in my tracks, because apparently some part of me remembered before I did. The body is strange that way.

We can think grief is intellectual. We imagine it as memory or sadness or conscious reflection. But I think grief also lives somewhere deeper than language. Somewhere underneath thought. Somewhere in the nervous system itself.

Sometimes the body keeps the calendar even when the mind forgets the date.

And when I realized what last week had been, I went back and reread the obituary I wrote for my Nana when she died. To this day, it is still my favorite piece of writing I have ever done.

Not because it is technically perfect or polished. But because it feels true, it feels like her.

I did not want to write an obituary that simply listed dates, accomplishments, and surviving relatives. None of that captured who she actually was. Nana was magic. Not metaphorically to us as children. Literally. Entirely. Completely.

She could determine whether you were still hungry by feeling your stomach.

She could tell whether you had actually bathed properly by smelling behind your ears and under your arms.

She could stop almost any bad decision with a single raised eyebrow and the words, “Suit yourself.”

She could move salt shakers without touching them. Though admittedly, we had to close our eyes first.

And somewhere in our family mythology, she permanently became 21 years old because that was the age she “got her magic.” So even though she lived to 93, none of us ever really experienced her as elderly. She somehow remained timeless.

When she died, I remember feeling this overwhelming pressure to get it right. Because writing about someone you love after they die is terrifying. You realize very quickly that language is too small for people. How do you summarize a human being? How do you explain warmth? How do you document laughter? How do you footnote magic?

What I eventually realized was that the goal was not to summarize her life. The goal was to let people feel her for one last time.

So I wrote about moonshine-running in Northern California. And off-key songs. And “patriotic legs.” And crawling through the luggage opening at the Russell Square tube station in London instead of paying the fare.

I wrote about her the way I actually knew her. And maybe that is why the piece still means so much to me. Because grief can tempt us to flatten people into formalities. But love remembers specifics.

Love remembers phrases. Love remembers gestures. Love remembers the way someone tilted their head before saying something. Love remembers the strange little details that made someone entirely themselves.

I think that is why I started missing her before I consciously realized the date. Because the people we truly love do not only live in memory. They live in us. In our rhythms. In our reflexes. In our nervous systems. In our stories.

And maybe grief is not always the pain of losing someone. Maybe sometimes grief is just love looking for somewhere to go. So tonight, one more time, Nana:

Good night, sweet dreams, God bless, love you.