Twenty Years

Does love ever really leave?

Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.

Early July 1982. I’m a few days old. That’s my Grama.

Love is a wild thing. It changes human beings irrevocably, binding them to each other without permission. In family, we don’t choose who we love, or who we are loved by, and we don’t get to decide how long family relationships last. We’re simply told there’s “nothing more important than family” and then when you lose a member of yours you’re kind of just shit out of luck.

There are versions of one-sided love that are misguided, if not toxic, but it can come in heroic forms, too. When someone dies, the one who loves them is left behind, and in news that’s quite shocking to me, the love doesn’t go anywhere. On December 24th 2003 my grandmother passed away. She was 75 years old, I was 21. On Sunday night I’ll have loved a grandmother who is no longer alive for twenty full years, and that love hasn’t lessened over time in any way. Wild indeed.