Apt B25

Nothing prepares you for the moment you have to be there for your mother as she loses her own. 

Pictures of Myself, My Mom, & Grandmother

The apartment on the corner of that Brooklyn street was everything to me. It was where my grandmother had lived when she moved to New York from Georgia, suitcase in hand like it held all the promise of a new life. It was where my mother had been born, her first cries echoing against the city’s hum. It had been the backdrop to our family’s story: a small, stubborn little place in a city that swallowed everything whole but still somehow managed to hold on to its own. It never really changed, not in the way the world did. But everything about that apartment changed once my grandmother died, and my mother moved in.

It was a small two-bedroom apartment, its walls painted an off-white cream that had yellowed slightly with time. The apartment hadn’t been updated since the ’80s or ’90s, giving it a nostalgic warmth, a space where time seemed to pause. The living room had two black leather couches, worn in from years of use, their creases and folds mapping out the weight of every visitor who had ever sat on them. Two bookshelves stood on the wall opposite of the only window in the room, filled with memories, photo albums, novels with dog-eared pages, and trinkets collected by my grandmother over the years. The couches were lined with fun throw pillows, some with little puppets sewn into them. On the coffee table, bird-shaped coasters sat stacked neatly, and along the radiator box by the window, a line of tiny figurines stood like silent observers of the room’s many stories. The bathroom had its own quirks, the tub was lined with painted footprints, faded but still visible, as if someone had once walked along the edge, tiptoeing around its rim like a tightrope walker trying not to fall.

My grandmother’s bedroom was bright white, airy, and always filled with light, no matter the time of day. Lace curtains framed the windows, delicate and soft, shifting slightly whenever the wind found its way inside. From the tops of the windows, plants dangled in their pots, their vines stretching toward the sunlight. She kept her sewing table at the foot of her bed, fabric scraps and spools of thread always within reach, and in the corner, her small gray box TV flickered with old black and white western films, its muted glow a constant companion throughout the night.

I didn’t understand any of it at first. I didn’t know what it meant to lose someone until I watched my mother do it. I didn’t know that you could grieve in the way she did, quiet and subtle, the kind of grief that didn’t look like weeping or pleading for one more day. Instead, it looked like new furniture and freshly painted walls. She started by getting rid of the old TV in the living room, the one my grandmother had kept for as long as I could remember. I’m pretty sure it was even older than my mom, it was one of those bulky boxy ones that felt like it came straight out of a 60s film. I noticed that change the second I stepped inside, but it wasn’t just the TV. It was everything. It was how the space felt emptier, like something had been hollowed out, and there was no way to fill it up again.

My mother has always been like that, a neat freak with a love for order. Ever since I was a kid, I knew the rhythm of her cleaning: the way she wiped down the counters with a precision that felt almost surgical, the way she folded laundry with a firmness that made it clear that there was no room for imperfection, the way everything in our closets had to be hung a certain way, the front of one shirt should never be touching the front of another. She had her rituals, and they were comforting because they were predictable. She was always like that, tidy, so controlled. But control never helped with grief because grief was wildly unpredictable.

The leather couches were gone too. The ones that creaked when you sat down too hard, that always stuck to the backs of my thighs in the summer heat. They were replaced by sleek, heather gray ones that felt too soft, like you could sink into them forever. I ran my hand across the smooth, unfamiliar fabric, remembering how much I hated those old couches. Now, I miss them. Because they weren’t just couches to me. They were the pieces of my grandmother’s life that had, in some strange way, made it feel like she was still there. Those old things were her, she was in the way the couch cracked under the pressure of years of use, in the smell of the leather, in the sound it made when I plopped down onto it. If I close my eyes, I can still hear the scrape of grandma's slippers against the old wood floors as she made her way from her bedroom, through the living room, and into the kitchen for an ice-cold glass of her favorite soda, Pepsi.

My grandmother was a better grandmother than she was a mother. That was something my mother never had to say out loud; I just knew. My mother’s childhood was full of the kind of love that was more about survival than warmth. My grandmother did what she had to do, raising my mother in that tiny Brooklyn apartment, working long hours, making sure there was always food on the table, but never quite learning how to be soft, learning how to love my mother in the ways she needed it then. My mother rarely spoke about it, but the tension between them was something I could always sense, like a conversation left unfinished.  But with me, my grandmother was different. She was patient, playful, and indulgent in a way she never had been with my mother. I have many fond memories of my grandmother’s apartment, but the one that will always stick with me is the silly arguments we used to have over a baby picture of me that sat on top of the TV. I was less than a year old, smiling brightly at the person behind the camera. I look a lot like my mother, but I look even more like my grandmother.

"That's me, you know," she would say, tapping the frame with her red nails.

"No, it's not," I'd argue, crossing my arms. "That’s me!"

She’d shake her head, feigning exasperation. "I don’t know… looks an awful lot like me when I was a baby."

She’d always ask me how I was so sure it was me and not her, and I’d laugh, telling her that if it were her, the photo would be in black and white instead of color. It was our routine, a joke we’d pass back and forth. 

My grandmother loved fridge magnets. Her collection of them had always struck me as a strange kind of art. They were never perfectly arranged, never matched in any sensible way. She had fruit magnets, animal ones, and magnets from places I didn’t even know existed. And then there was the Hello Kitty magnet I had bought her when I was a kid, tucked between them, just as out of place but somehow perfect. My mother kept those magnets, most of them at least, it’s the biggest display of my grandmother throughout the entire apartment. They were stuck on the fridge now, a remnant of my grandmother in a place that no longer felt like hers. 

“Looks different, huh?” my mom said from the kitchen, her voice light like it didn’t matter.

I nodded, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to explain why it felt like my grandmother was slipping away a little more every time something was thrown out, every time something was replaced. It wasn’t just the furniture. It was everything. The dishes in the cabinets weren’t the same. Gone were the mismatched plates and the chipped teacups that had been used for as long as I could remember. They were replaced with monochromatic ones, the kind that didn’t have a story and were just plain boring. The bookshelf was nearly empty, except for a few framed photos and candles, some of them still new, never lit.

I hated it. I hated how my mother had made the place feel so different. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand it because I did. I understood it in the way you understand a bruise, that slow, aching pressure that feels like it will never heal. But I wasn’t ready to let go of the apartment in the way I knew it, the place that held the traces of every conversation, every argument, every laugh, every quiet moment we had ever shared. It wasn’t just a place to me, it was my home away from home.

I was angry because I was 16, and at 16 it’s very common to carry so much hurt and anger and aim it at your mother, but I was angry at the wrong person. I didn’t understand what she was doing at the time, but as the years have passed and I’ve grown older, I see it now. My mother wasn’t just clearing the space. She was trying to make a place where grief wasn’t sitting on top of everything, pressing down until it felt like we were drowning in it. It wasn’t about erasing my grandmother, at least not really. It was about trying to find a way to breathe again. It was about making the space bearable to be in, to create new memories in a space that wasn’t clouded by the grief of losing someone so important to us.

Grief isn’t always loud. It doesn’t always scream, cry, and curse the world. Sometimes it’s quiet. It’s in the way someone moves through a house, the way they rearrange everything to fit the pieces of their heart back together. Grief is in the way my mother moved around the kitchen that day, hands trembling just a little, lips pressed together in a way that said more than words ever could. I wasn’t the one who had lost my mother. She was.

I wanted her to mourn out loud like I had seen others do. I wanted the catharsis of tears and outbursts, but that wasn’t how she grieved. She grieved with her hands, with the things she could touch, with the spaces she could change. Sitting on those new couches, I understand it now. I don’t complain. I don’t tell her how much I miss the old ones. I just sink into them, into the silence, into the small comfort of knowing that we were both grieving in the only way we knew how. In solitude and solace, in distance and forgiveness. 

I didn’t realize it then, but my mother kept a lot more of my grandmother than I had noticed. It wasn’t always out in the open, but she was still there, scattered in small, quiet corners of the apartment, woven into the fabric of the space in ways I hadn’t seen before. My grandmother wasn’t gone; she was hidden in plain sight. She is the crystal candy dish sitting in the cabinet of the entertainment system, that glass bowl with its smooth and elegant curves. She was the leather purse hanging in the coat closet, still holding the faint scent of her perfume. She is the ashtray resting on the windowsill, holding the trace of a life that had been lived. She is the blanket my mother kept on her bed, the one that smelled like old nights and the comfort of familiarity. She is the Whitney Houston vinyl sitting on the shelf, tucked away, waiting to be played. She is the yellow beret my mother wears every winter when I’m back home from school. But most of all, she is the urn full of ashes sitting upon a dresser by a small window in my mother's closet, watching my mother do what she does best, the one thing they bonded over the most, “getting all dolled up”. These pieces of my grandmother had stayed behind, quietly tucked into the spaces that my mother couldn’t bear to erase. My grandmother’s presence still vibrated through that apartment. I just couldn’t see it then.