I had never been close to him. Not in the way a child clings to a grandfather’s lap, not in the way memory softens the outlines of a man. He was always the Other Lolo. The one I didn’t grow up with. My mother’s father, tall and immovable, his jaw a square that seemed carved from refusal. His eyes, they said, were like mine. I looked for myself in him, but I never found it.

Before I left the hospital room, Lolo Eddie pressed a wad of money into my hand. For the watch. A gesture rare enough to feel like a rupture in his armor. He never gave me stuff. He was stingy and he didn’t really buy into the whole gifting your grandkids thing.

But today, he pressed some bills into my palm. He even smiled, faint, almost apologetic. It was the first time his face opened toward me. It’s the last time I would see him alive.

Thirty minutes later, beneath the bright hum of the mall, I stood in front of glass cases filled with clocks of every kind, time multiplying in rows of faces that are gleaming and newly-minted and endless. My phone buzzed. My mother’s caller ID flashed in the screen. I braced myself, like the way one would brace before a car crash. And in that moment, I held both. The watch I hadn’t fully chosen yet, and the time I could never get back.

My mother’s voice drifted like a distant siren’s call, pared down to its barest syllables: He’s gone.

Just two words. Enough to split the air between us. After that, nothing. Only the hush of distance, the way a body falls into water without sound.

I didn’t reply. Her grief moved in one direction, mine in another, like parallel rivers that never touched. Still, I held the phone close, as if the warmth of her breath might cross the street and find me inside the bright cold light of the mall. Seconds were stretched by silence into something translucent and fragile. My mother didn’t really know how to talk about feelings.

Then the line broke, clean as a snapped thread.

The beep went on, a small machine heart still beating after everything else had stopped.

I felt some sort of sadness. But it was the thin kind of sadness. The one that felt like tracing the outline of a shadow, knowing it isn’t the body. The sadness you’re expected to carry simply because a life has ended and you were near enough to witness its vanishing.

It was not the collapse I had seen in films, where the body buckles under grief, where the air itself seems to cave in. My knees stayed firm. The world, indifferent, held on without consideration.

So I didn’t run back to the hospital. I stayed under the fluorescent hum of the mall, the glass counters bright with their quiet ticking. I chose the first watch my eyes fell on and slid my grandfather’s bills across the counter. Time, purchased with his parting gesture.

The next hours blurred with the ringing phones, the glow of unread messages, his name breaking apart in the mouths of relatives. On my father’s side, the unmarried aunts stepped forward, their efficiency almost ritual: voices clipped, hands already drafting lists, calling parlors, haggling over flowers. They moved with the steadiness of women who had spent a lifetime preparing for the weight of other people’s deaths.

On my mother’s side, paralysis. Grief like a fog that thickened with each minute. They wept but did not move. As though crying could be a substitute for arranging, as though the body’s collapse might itself be enough to honor him.

And so the work fell to others.

Wherever I went, I was met with sympathy. Hands pressed briefly to my back, a quiet murmur: You’re holding up so well. But composure is not strength. It is only absence. And absence was the only thing I could offer him.

At least, this is what I tell myself.

The truth was, I didn’t want to think about him. Not about the smile, its suddenness, its brevity, the way it carried both a beginning and an end. Affection is difficult to mourn when it arrives only once, too late to become memory. You cannot yearn for what you were never given.

Forty days after his death, my grandmother began the work of erasure. We opened drawers, folded shirts, stacked the hollow shapes of his shoes. I wrote labels: discard, give away, keep. The air heavy with the dust of years. Objects waiting to be judged, stripped of their function, of the man who once filled them. Each item a question: what remains of him, and what never belonged to us at all.

By mid-afternoon the boxes were nearly full, shirts folded flat as paper, belts coiled like sleeping snakes. My grandmother set aside the marker I’d been using, asked me to stay for merienda. From a dented thermos she poured hot cocoa into two chipped cups. When she sat beside me, her face carried the faint shine of someone who had been crying.

We drank in silence. The sound of spoons against porcelain, the soft hum of the fan, the faint sweetness of cocoa, all of it filling the space where words might have been.

Then she asked if I remembered the summer I broke my collarbone falling from a tree. Of course, I remembered. I had swallowed my sobs as Lolo Eddie bound my shoulder before driving me to the hospital. The only summer I stayed with them.

Crying won’t make it hurt less, I said, mimicking his low, steady voice.

My grandmother let out a laugh, thin and brittle, a laugh that dissolved before it reached her eyes. Those eyes, ever since his death, held grief in quiet suspension, not sharp anymore, but always present, like sediment at the bottom of a glass.

“You were his favorite apo,” she said, her voice breaking. “He just didn’t know how to say he loved you. You know, in the hospital room, he wanted you to stay.”

I stared at the watch on my wrist. Its face caught the light, and with it came the memory of his. Creased. Smiling. A rare opening. He had reached out to me that day. Reached, and I slipped away.

Something split inside me then. As if a seam in the skin had given way and I could no longer hold myself together. I leaned into my grandmother, holding her the way I had held my body for years. Tight. Contained. Unyielding. And then wetness, sudden and warm, slid down my cheek. The first time I cried for him.

But I did not know what I was crying for. The chances I never took. The words unsaid. Or the possibility that grief itself had arrived too late, irrelevant now.

The watch grew heavier against my wrist. A weight beyond metal. Beyond gears. I wondered if this was grief. Not an explosion but an anchor. A slow pulling under. And why now, after silence, after so much refusal.

I knew the questions would not answer themselves. Still, I sat there in my grandmother’s kitchen, knees folding at last, undone by a grief that had taken its time to find me.