The Year of Postponed Grief
Sixteen months after my grandmother died, my family finally gathered to bury her.
On Saturday, we buried my grandmother. Meemaw died , during the first wave of COVID-19 casualties in America, at the age of 94. For months, her death had felt abstract; I was 900 miles away from my family, and I felt like I was holding my breath, unsure how to fathom the loss alone. Sixteen months later, I finally exhaled. We buried Meemaw’s ashes next to my grandfather in a small cemetery in central Iowa, where my grandmother had spent most of her life and where she’d raised
