Filling the Void

I woke up this morning in my grandmother’s South Carolina farmhouse, surrounded by nothing but fields of horses and goats, while the smell of sausage and biscuits and brewing coffee sneaked through the small crack under my bedroom door. “The pink room,” we call it, in honor of its mauve walls and pink and green retro flowered sheets leftover from when my aunts lived here in the late 1970s.

My grandfather died in a hospital in Columbia on this day two years ago. So while we celebrate Christmas - with songs around my grandma’s old upright piano, the one she taught me and my two sisters on; with carefully selected gifts; with treks through the pastures and woods behind her house – she works to celebrate with us while holding on to his memory. She has moved his massive recliner to another side of the room, unable to look at it in its original place, beside his bookcase and magazines and reading lamp. He, in all his 6’2”, Baptist preacher, horseman glory, filled its grand expanse. Grandchildren, even the grown-up ones, get lost within its dark leather folds. And so we summon each other – from the youngest at six years old, to the oldest in their 20s, all to pile in together, to fill it up, to try and fill the void he’s left behind.