We took a summer break! This post is from July 4, 2025. Hey everybody, very sorry for the late/delayed posts. Life has been very hectic recently, but I will post a bunch of posts back to back this time.
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As you can probably guess from this title, I recently experienced a loss while in Japan.
This Father’s Day, my great grandmother Judy–or Grandma Duck Duck, as we so fondly called her–passed away. She was 89 years old, only a month short of her 90th birthday. Not only am I not home, but I am thousands of miles away from it. This morning, I attended her funeral via zoom call. As my family said their goodbyes and mourned in solidarity with one another, I was watching on my bed, alone, only the blackness of the 3 A.M. sky keeping me company.
It is hard to continue with life as normal, yet I also feel as though nothing has changed.
Grieving at a distance is idiosyncratic; my heart and my mind know I have lost someone but my body and my time don’t seem to care.
Loss is something that is obviously very difficult. It cuts deep, encompassing every bone and crevice in your body. But the fact that it happened while I was abroad has made this process of grieving and healing so much more difficult. I can’t uproot my life to give myself time to mourn Duck Duck; even if I wanted to. I had a test, a group project, and choir rehearsals all on the day she died. Grief is not an excuse to miss your commitments, they say.
I haven’t even cried yet. Obviously, tears are not a necessity for someone to grieve, and that does not mean that I don’t love her. I loved my Duck Duck so much; instead of sadness, I feel numbness. It feels like this huge prank has been pulled on me and I am just waiting for Ashton Kutcher to jump out and yell “You just got PUNK’D!”. But Kutcher never comes, and I am left alone with the reality that my beautiful, lovely Duck Duck is gone.
There is a James Patterson quote I feel resonates with me at the moment:
“The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you’re faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking.”
Even though my world seems to be flipped on its axis, it still keeps spinning. The world does not stop for my grief, even though I really, really want it to. Despite my desire to bedrot and ignore the world for a week, the world is too busy turning to notice or care that I am gone. I can not simply stop living my life in the shadow of grief of someone I once loved, but I also deserve the space to mourn her in the way that I need.
It has been difficult managing these feelings while being so separated from the source of them. It’s hard, but a much needed, albeit brutal, punch in the face from reality that the world does not stop for me, even if I wanted it to. As unfortunate at it is, Duck Duck is only the beginning of many deaths in my life when I will be away from home, and what better time than now, when I have absolutely no one in my family around me, to develop the coping mechanisms necessary for dealing with loss without perspiring into a pool of uncontainable sorrow.
Being abroad while struggling with the death of a loved one has not been an ideal experience – neither is being anywhere and being faced with death – but I am thankful for the opportunity to mature, even though it came at the expense of the loss of life.
I will miss you Duck Duck, and I do miss you, and I will carry your legacy through me.
Your chickadee forever.
DU Abroad 