It’s swimsuit season, and I’m in Hawaii. The land of bikinis and washboard abs. This is the place where fat rolls and stretch marks come to die.
In my family of planners, it’s virtually unheard of— but the crazy thing about this trip is that it was booked shockingly last minute.
Just days before our flight, I was stood before a crowd of 80 people, eulogizing my grandmother, who had only just turned 70 years old.
It wasn’t an unexpected death, but it certainly hit me like it was. It felt like she had so much living left to do.
She was just talking about refinishing the floors in her house. She was engaged to be married. Last time I saw her, she told me she wanted me to be her maid of honor.
She sat in a hospital bed with wrinkled hands when she said it, but she spoke like she was my age, so giddy and in love, like there was nothing else in the world to worry about besides floral arrangements and the flavor of her wedding cake.
She had trouble opening pudding cups and her face was swollen from whatever drugs they were pumping into her, but she had a whole life ahead of her.
I guess there was a part of me that knew there probably wouldn’t be much walking down the aisle if her legs weren’t strong enough to get her there.
But it was easier just to believe all of her plans for the future that she drenched in a sort of childish naivety- to believe that her floors would be refinished by the end of August or that next year she’d be well enough to host Christmas again, or that I’d be making a maid of honor speech- so I believed it. We believed it together.
I think her last breath was just as unexpected to her as it was to me.
I wrote her eulogy like a maid of honor speech, still stuck in my delusion. She didn’t want this. She didn’t want a eulogy. I wanted to give her what she really wanted. As far as I was concerned, we had a wedding to plan.
In my speech, I added stupid jokes about old boyfriends and I imagined her young and beautiful and happy when I wrote it, because I think that’s the way she’d want me to remember her.
But as much as I tried to imagine her young, the wrinkled version of my grandmother kept creeping into my brain.
The version that had smile lines
And a little pasta belly
And that weird fingernail that grew downward around the tip of her finger
And the freckles on her nose that matched the freckles on mine.
She'd point to her nose and then to mine and say,"They're angel kisses."
I liked this version of her better. A little lived in. A little softer. This is the way I knew her.
By the time the day finally came, we were exhausted. No one tells you how tiring planning a wedding can be.
Maybe that’s the real reason people go on honeymoons. Because The Planning took all the energy they had, balled it up, threw it across the world to a little tropical island, and said,”You want it back? Go get it.” And so the couple was left with no choice but to travel to this little tropical island to retrieve their energy.
Our energy landed on Maui. Hawaii was our honeymoon.
“Let’s just book it. We need to get away. We need a break.”
And so we did.
But there wasn’t much time to prepare, and I don’t mean prepare in the “stock up on sunscreen” and “make sure your meds are filled before you leave” kind of way. I mean in the way that Emily Blunt prepared for her trip to Paris in Devil Wears Prada.
“I’m on this new diet. I don’t eat anything and then when I feel like I’m about to faint, I eat a cheese cube.”
All the girls in the movies starve before a big trip. But it appeared that we were not like the girls from the movies.
We just entertained a house full of Italians, and ate leftover Funeral Baked Ziti for a week.
We spent so much time making prayer cards and funeral pamphlets, that we forgot to grocery shop and ate Top Ramen for dinner like a bunch of college kids.
There was no room for that kind of preparation in our house even though the obligation breathed down my neck like an unwelcome guest.
I boarded our plane chronically bloated, not because of my carb intake, but because of what I now understand to be Endometriosis.
For the last 6 months, my stomach has been blown up like a balloon. I have sharp pains and leg cramps and it sometimes it stops me from sleeping, but for some reason, the worst part was that my loose shorts were now difficult to button.
Because they’re supposed to be my loose shorts.
About a week before our trip, it had become too difficult to ignore, so I went to the doctor.
The girl who called me back for my vitals looked like she was about my age, which somehow made me feel old and young at the same time.
Old because when I think about nurses, I think about Grandma- tender and motherly in nature. I had trouble understanding that it was possible I had reached an age that granted me that kind of tenderness. That kind of motherliness.
And yet, I felt young because this girl, delicately wrapping the blood pressure cuff around my arm, was shy and her scrubs swallowed her whole and when she asked me about my symptoms, it felt like we were two kids playing pretend.
She told me to step up onto the scale and I had the urge to close my eyes, as to avoid knowing my weight before I spent the next 2 weeks in a bikini.
But I didn’t want to interrupt our game of play pretend, so I opted for keeping my eyes open & looked coolly at the wall in front of me instead.
I secretly hoped she wouldn’t say the weight out loud, but in case she did, I was already building up excuses in my head for any possible weight gain.
“I’m wearing a sweatshirt AND bulky shoes, and I did eat a salad before I got here… That has to be at least 3 extra pounds that don’t really count.”
She never said it out loud, but I knew that she knew, and somehow that was worse— being perceived. Knowing there was a possibility that she was questioning what the body beneath my sweatshirt looked like.
I wanted to scream,”I promise I’m still beautiful!” Like the number at my feet required some sort of justification.
I really couldn’t tell the difference between weight and bloat but in hindsight, it didn’t matter. She could’ve told me any number that day, and it probably wouldn’t have changed how I was feeling about myself.
I mentioned our upcoming trip to the doctor when I saw her.
“Oh good. I think that’s definitely what you need right now.”
I wondered what led her to that conclusion— if maybe I had carried the stress of my weigh-in into the examination room. Or if perhaps my blood pressure had been high.
“Enjoy your trip, and make sure you relax!” She told me on her way out the door.
But on the plane, I thought of ways I could keep the bloating down on vacation. I could make sure to stop eating after 7pm and avoid foods with salt, and I’ll try not to drink that much…
And for a short moment, I tried. But it was miserable.
To watch late movies without popcorn. To see the waiter bring out a blended drink and set it down on the table next to us. To order the egg bites even though the bagel was what I really wanted.
It turned out that the kind of “relaxing” I had been prescribed only truly worked if it consisted mostly of Mai Tai’s in tall glasses, and every form of ahi tuna you could possibly think of.
If it consisted of “Do you want a bite of mine?” And “Is anyone hungry for ice cream?”
Somewhere between the lobster tacos and the 7th piña colada of the trip, I stopped thinking about my stomach or the way it curled when I sat crisscrossed in a swimsuit. About how my arm looked pressed against my side or about how to prevent my bloating. About if the girl down the beach was judging the way my swimsuit fit me.
None of it mattered. Because the body that I had judged so harshly in the doctor’s office, was also the body that carried me up hikes and kept me afloat when I swam in the ocean. I was so engaged in these little moments that I forgot to care about what I looked like doing them.
On one particular walk back from a restaurant, I said to my mom,”I can’t remember what it feels like to be hungry,” and she said,”Isn’t it awesome?”
And it was. But what was even more awesome is that this woman that I most idolized, never made me feel like I should care about little things like eating an extra slice or ordering another drink or being a little bloated.
She never seemed to have any of her own insecurities, and even if she did, she never projected them.
She drank 2 cups of coffee and ate a chocolate muffin before changing into a swimsuit, because she knew that fueling her body was more important than caring about the way it looked on the beach.
And everyday, she packed a family sized bag of pretzels in her beach bag in case any of us got hungry.
Being around her taught me that our bodies are to be admired, not for their slimness or their smoothness but because of their strength, their intelligence, their uniqueness.
They're made-- not to be judged on a display when the cellulite sprinkles along your left thigh--- but for surfing.
And hiking
And swimming in waterfalls
And eating around a table of people you love
And pumping blood through your veins and oxygen through your lungs so you can stay alive long enough to do it all over again the next day.
On this trip, she told me about how she was excited to get old– that she didn’t understand how people worked so tirelessly to avoid aging with creams and injections and surgeries because she feels like getting old is a privilege.
I think people who have experienced death tend not to be afraid of aging– tend not to be afraid of changing.
They welcome weight gain and grey hairs like an old friend they’ve been expecting.
My mom and I, we’ve been unfortunate enough to become seasoned Eulogy Writers. We’ve experienced enough loss to last us a lifetime.
My mom will never know what her first husband looked like with wrinkles, my dad will never know what his first wife looked like with grey hair, and I will never know what my grandmother would have looked like in a wedding dress.
But because of this, I feel hopeful that one day I will be able to see myself that way.
That maybe I’ll have some wrinkles from my time spent in the sun or some stretch marks from a pregnancy or two, or a scar from the time I scraped my hip on the kitchen cabinet trying to reach for a wine glass, or a couple extra pounds from a really fun vacation.
That someday, I’ll have so many little signs of a life well lived tattooed across my body that you could piece them all together like a constellation.
In Maui, I’ve eaten pie, and ice cream, and popcorn, and fruit, and so much fish it’d blow your mind. I’ve probably gained about 5 pounds. They sit soundly on my midsection.
It makes me think about my grandma's little pasta belly. I think about how it looks like mine.
How lucky am I to have a changing body? To gain weight and freckles and scars? To resemble someone I love?
How lucky am I to age?
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