Time, My Friend

Three months. It's been three months since I arrived in Canada as an exchange student. I live in France, in a small village called Saint-Mars-la-Réorthe and approximately 4,889 kilometres away from Fredericton. It took me some time to adjust to this sudden change, but now I feel good. I no longer have that knot in my stomach that haunted me constantly during the first month of my exchange.  

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On March 23, I learned of my grandmother's death in France. Unexpected and sudden news. My dear grandmother, to whom I had promised to bring back maple syrup and to find a lumberjack husband. Well, that won't happen.  

  

I'm sitting in a lounge, on the phone with my girlfriend. It's 1 p.m. in Canada, 5 p.m. in France. Everything is going well; I will see her again in a few weeks. We discuss God, beliefs, and religion. My brain is buzzing as the discussion is deep and interesting. Suddenly, a call waiting interrupts my state of ultimate concentration. It's my dad calling. Strange, he's not calling me on FaceTime as he usually does. I hesitate to answer, I don't want to leave my girlfriend. After a few seconds, I decide to answer. "I'll call you back in a moment, honey," I say in a cheerful and loving tone.  

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When I answer, my father's voice is more subdued, more monotone than usual. He talks to me about the weather without paying too much attention to what he's saying and what I'm replying, I can feel it. Then, after a silence, he tells me, "Well, grandma left us half an hour ago." The first stage of grieving kicks in: shock. Very violent, I tremble, and I can't control my tears. My father doesn't cry, though. He tells me to go see my friends, to party for her. At that moment, I don't care about what he's telling me. I don't feel like doing anything.  

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I climb the stairs leading to my room, but I have to stop halfway because I can't move forward. I hold onto the railing, otherwise I feel like I'm going to fall. It reminds me of a scene from a movie where the protagonist is so stunned that he collapses to the ground. I always found it rather exaggerated, I didn't think that's what one could feel in reality.  

  

I didn't call my girlfriend back. It didn't even cross my mind.  

  

I knew my grandma was sick; she had cancer for several months. But she was a fighter, and nothing indicated her imminent death. I wanted to tell her about my Canadian experience. I wanted her to be there when I returned.  

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I call my brother the same evening. He jokes around but I can tell he's affected.  

  

My brother is a pilot. That afternoon, he had taken my other grandparents flying for the first time in a small plane. "It's crazy, Pauline, I think we took off at the same time as Grandma." He adds a sentence that makes me both laugh and cry: "There was a lot of wind, so the plane was moving a lot. You should have seen Grandma Françoise's face, she was terrified. I like to think that wind was our other grandma teasing Grandma Françoise as she ascended towards the sky. You know how she was a little jealous of the relationship we have with her.”  

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I like this idea, because if that's really the case, if it's really a sign from my grandmother, it means she still has an influence on earthly elements. As an accomplished Cartesian, I must admit that it's a bit hard to believe. But this mystical thought is comforting. Thinking that she can still be near me, but in a different way is really comforting.  

  

It's true that my grandma was jealous of my other grandma. She wanted to be the favorite, she wanted to be the best one. She was special. She was on many points. She lived in a big house with her husband. I loved visiting her, it made me feel good. She talked about her childhood memories and the traumas that had shaped her. We talked about current topics, wokeness, the war in Israel. She would tell me her story; I would tell her about my youthful adventures. She expressed her opinion. Always. Grandma's little touch. We learned from each other, and it made our discussions particularly rich and interesting.  

  

I reread our conversations, the last ones before her death. The words are simple, no frills. No frills? My grandma loved frills. This absence of complexity in her sentences already testified to her increasing weakness. I could feel she was weakened, but I absolutely refused to think that she might die before my return, in just one month. Just one month.  

In her usual messages, she talked to me about Baudelaire, about Shakespeare. She told me to read Nietzsche and listen to Haydn. That's what I did, sometimes reluctantly because when you are a young adult, it's not the most pleasant thing.  

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But now, I would love to receive a message like that. "Pauline, listen to Mahler's 4th Symphony and tell me what you think." We would discuss it when I returned, and she would listen to my opinion attentively. But my opinion wouldn't influence hers. Oh no. My grandma knew what she thought, knew what she wanted. She would not let herself be influenced. It was beautiful to see. But it was a little less beautiful to experience when it came to debating with her.  

 

I have only one regret, but I've been told it's normal to have one. My grandma couldn't wait for me to fall in love, to introduce her to a man from a good family so she could show off to her friends. That never happened, I never introduced anyone to her.  

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One month before leaving for Canada, I fell in love for the first time. It's a moment I wanted to share with my grandma, of course. However, I didn't fall in love with someone who met her criteria. Worse, I fell in love with a woman. And that, I couldn't tell my grandma. At least, not for now.  

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"I'll tell her when I get back," I thought. I had a mix of eagerness and fear at the idea of presenting to her the person I was going to call "my girlfriend" right in front of her eyes. A bit of audacity, my grandma liked things that deviated from norms. But was this deviation too much for her? I don't know. And I was terrified of the answer.  

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I would have liked to have her reaction. Maybe everything would have gone well, that her open-mindedness would have allowed her to reconsider her criteria so that her granddaughter wouldn't suffer from them. Or maybe she would have started shouting at me or crying, disappointed. I'll never know. I can only hope that her reaction would have allowed us to maintain this precious bond that united us.  

 

Grieving is an experience both universal and personal. I realize that. We all go through the loss of a loved one sooner or later in life. But the way to approach this loss varies so much between each person. And even though this loss is very hard to overcome for me, I trust time to do its job and ease my heart.  

  

It's my first mourning. It’s the first time I say goodbye to someone knowing it's a definitive one. But mourning is also an unwanted goodbye. Double difficulty. Ouch. Experiencing it abroad is very strange for my young adult brain. I would have liked this ultimate goodbye to be done properly, for me to be physically present next to her coffin. I would have liked it to live up to the love and esteem I felt towards my grandma. Thus, it's difficult to avoid feeling guilty.  

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So I did my best. Very simply, I wrote a text as a goodbye and I recorded myself reading it. I had 10 lines to read. It took me 2 hours before I managed to recite it without bursting into tears in the middle of reading. My father set up a speaker in the church so that my voice would resonate within its walls. And so that my grandma could hear me. If she can hear me. Thank you, Dad.  

  

In fact, nothing has changed for me in Canada. I continue my usual life, my Canadian routine, so different from my French one. And that's my biggest fear; my return to France. I dread the moment when I will get into my car and think, "I'm going to my grandparents', oh no, to my grandfather's." I dread the moment when I will park in their home's yard. I will have to get out of the car and knock on the door.  

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It was always my grandma who opened it. Usually, she wore a pink apron, with tomato and flour stains on it. The kitchen was invaded by the smell of herbs and spices. She could spend whole weekends in her kitchen, trying out recipes as quirky as they were delicious (not always). And buttery. "The secret is butter, Pauline. That's what satisfies your brain." 

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I imagine coming into the house and not stumbling upon a culinary scene. I think that's exactly the moment I dread. Visual and olfactory disillusionment.  

  

I'm returning to France in 24 days. 576 hours. I think about it constantly. In these 24 days that count down in hours, I feel the weight of time passing, inexorably. Every minute that goes by brings me closer to that dreaded return, to those reunions tainted with absence. Because time, that cruel master, spares no one. It shapes memories, it heals wounds, but it never returns what has been lost.  

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I realize that time is both my ally and my enemy. It gives me the opportunity to heal, to mend my wounds, but it also distances me from my grandmother, from her smiles, her advice, and her unconditional love. Every passing moment reminds me of the emptiness of her physical presence in my life.  

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Yet, despite the pain of this loss, I feel that time has a healing power. Little by little, it softens the edges of my sorrow, it lessens the pain that grips my heart. I find myself smiling when I think back to her anecdotes, her flavourful expressions, our lively discussions.  

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Time also gives me the opportunity to reflect on what my grandmother would have wanted for me. I realize that she would have wished to see me happy, fulfilled, no matter my life choices. And perhaps, somewhere, she continues to watch over me, guiding my steps in this new stage of my existence without her.