I was home for my grandma’s funeral.

I slept in her bedroom, as I had done many times before after she moved to the nursing home. This time was different because she was never coming home.

As I sat with my grief, I took in the room around me. Except for a few more cracks in the walls and additional dust, the white plaster walls and red and black patterned curtains were just as she left them. The wooden floorboards at the foot of the bed creaked just as always. Grandpa’s highboy dresser and grandma’s wide chest of drawers, both with a golden lacquered 1960s wood finish, guarded each side of the doorway. Grandpa’s dressing chair perched under the window across the room. The bed stretched from the wall into the middle of the room.

The memories flooded back. I watched Johnny Carson say goodbye with grandma from this bed when I was 11. I unscrewed the empty black, red, and gold perfume bottles on her dresser, the same bottles I opened and inhaled from when I was a little girl. Despite containing no perfume, they still held their scent. I pulled on each little round gold knob and explored her dresser drawers. They were filled with pink Velcro curlers and blue plastic pins, costume jewelry with matching clip-on earrings, metal hair picks, and random papers from a life that reached its finality. I discovered a disintegrating dark box containing their wedding album from May 1946. My grandparents enjoying the start of their life together post-war.

As I worked my way around her room, I moved to what was my grandpa’s highboy. His brown leather wallet was in the top drawer, his driver’s license and credit cards just as he left them. Only the cash was missing. It was like someone took what they needed and left everything else for the owner to retrieve. A lost item that would never be claimed.

I opened the brown wooden slat cabinet door on my grandpa’s side of the bed and halted at my discovery. His deodorant, athlete’s foot spray, and every toiletry was still as he had left it. It hadn’t been touched in more than 20 years. The grief my grandma felt for her husband of 47 years was on full display. I could feel its gravity. Now I understood his wallet. She didn’t have the bandwidth to dispose of it or its contents.

I will never know if she ever opened that cabinet after she was a widow. If she kept it as a remembrance of the life she shared with him or if she simply couldn’t face throwing it out. Maybe leaving the cabinet full of his lotions and sprays made him a little less gone. A 12 square foot space where he wasn’t dead.

This discovery complicated my grief. I grieved not just for my grandma, but also for my grandpa. It was as if her death took a piece of him too. There was no reason to maintain this monument to my grandpa’s hygiene routine now that she was gone. My Uncle Willie would eventually clean out what she couldn’t. He would let go of the last piece of her grief.