I don't know how to feel.

Grief and mourning, I think, seem by nature concrete and dichotomous: either you are grieving and your entire countenance is given over to it, or you are not. The intensity of these feelings may vary, or their duration, but never how they are manifested. It seems to us a fallacy, an unfathomable excuse: I don't know how to feel. We cannot grasp that death engenders uncertainty. We may not weep nor wail nor pull our hair, but we are somber. We have 'respect'.

My grandfather passed away on Thursday. Far from being unexpected, his death has come with plenty of warning, with a sense of finality and relief. (He had been progressively ill, and living in a nursing home for many months.)

In honesty, given my grandfather's disposition, it is difficult to find grief within me, grief that is at least representational of itself: sober, head bowed, involved with the business of being see, grief that assumes the same posture as those around you in order to uphold its two sides, to remain within the bounds of its own etiquette. One does not smile during this time, unless it is through tears: what a sweet and poignant story, about the time he slipped and fell into the cow's trough. How sad it makes us to recall. Memory, tempered by time, feels like an anodyne, a thin layer of salve over what we're in denial of, may have, to save ourselves the thought of it, attempted to leave behind.

Now, I am the uncertain one. What an excuse this must seem, an evasion of what's expected of me-to mourn my grandfather properly, to stay quiet, morose, and perhaps to cry, to weep a little for this man who raised my mother, who is mourning also. To feel paid as my grandmother does. And, instead, I utter the phrase once, when a friend asks how I am, then again when a coworker does the same: I don't really know how to feel. In this fashion, grief is kinder, more immediate for those who knew the dead, who could fix them a cup of coffee with two sugars, tripped over their shoes in the entryway, shook their hand or kissed their cheek or waved to them across the supermarket. The tangibility of it, the knowledge of another person's present and soon past, and then future-ness-a place in our minds that cannot be otherwise occupied. Disappearance.

Having been apart from my mom's family for some years, I can no longer envision them. I have two cousins I have never met, whose existences are, painfully, only that. I am aware of them as one is aware of a photograph, a vague and sometimes negligible affection for faces on a flat surface, there and not there, glossy and unreal. For weeks now, as Grandpa fluctuated from lucid to incoherent, remember my mother and fed himself, then refused to be bathed and could no longer recognize Grandma, I have wrestled with what images I have of him, someone whose place is occupied by transparency, his face in my mind always a part of some other memory, another, more lasting recollection. My brothers and sister have all been to Iowa more recently, a feat I have not managed. They say the loss is made less difficult by seeing the loved one as they were in life, so that one is able to preserve their motions, the little details. I try to conjure up something, anything about him that causes me to smile a little, to find inside myself that bittersweetness we are supposed to feel. I fail.

I try again, and fail.

My earliest and only memories of my mother's father are unpleasant. He was a gruff man, full of criticism for my timid, gentle grandmother, and for my mother, who is like her. One summer they visited us, and my mother worked her fingers to the bone to provide a clean house, a fishing trip, hot meals. Grandpa mocked her, mocked my grandmother as well, for what, I don't remember. I only remember him making my mother cry.

Someone else asks how my mother and grandmother are doing. I can only say that they're OK, that it hasn't been so bad. That I just spoke to both of them and they seemed fine. I cannot assume an air of sorrow. I can only be sorrowful for them, for their loss is not mine, not when all I remember is that my grandfather, that I know of, did not bring anyone lasting job. And suddenly I am standing at the counter of my favorite coffee shop sobbing.

This then is the way we become mourners: inexplicably, in the middle of routine, shaking nutmeg into a dark espresso, believing ourselves exempt from the slow onset of it, and what I really mourn are the gaps in time, the happiness I cannot assign to my grandfather's life, to his relationships with my mother and grandmother, and through them, to me.

My mother calls. The funeral is over. They gave Grandpa full military honors, a folded flag in my grandmother's hands, my brother reading from the Bible. It was lovely to see all the cousins and old friends, she says, a way to catch up, albeit not the way she'd have liked. Such guilt: this man served in WWII. He was a soldier and then a veteran. How can one imagine or begin to judge the life of someone who has, in essence, already given theirs-to the dark and inescapable battlefield, to some cataclysmic event long past and yet still with us? My grandmother comes on and tells me about the dress uniforms, the twenty-one gun salute of sorts. This too is grief: salutations to those who are honorable, though we may not even know their names. Predecession as worthy of silence, of prayer, while among us still stand the products of it, its lingering and real countenance. She sounds only sleepy, not tired nor under duress. She says she knows he's in a better place.

I speak to my mother again, briefly, to tell her that I'm sorry I couldn't make it. And I am. I regret that she had no one to help carry her suitcases, her head slack, cushioned by the cold window of an airplane. I do not tell her I am relieved. To attend the funeral, I feel, would have been hypocritical, a show of grief that is not mine to have, so I tell her I love her and to put Grandma back on, so I can say that I love her, too.

We bear it together, parts of a spectrum, across all these miles, the legacy of this man with his gruffness, the years he spent in the military. I say that I love them both, hang up the phone. Outside the rain is coming down on the pavement, and there's a raspberry bush sending its scent up into the air.