The Day That Asks How Much You Loved: On Grief, Independence, and the Fourth of July

I have never once slept in on the Fourth of July. My body wakes up early on this day the way it wakes up early before bad news, before it's said anything to me yet. There's a smell that comes with it, charcoal starting somewhere, a flag snapping against a pole, and my stomach drops before my brain catches up with why.

I loved this day once. I mean that plainly, not as a setup for the rest of this.

In a small town in Illinois, the Fourth of July was not a lesser Christmas. If anything, it outranked it. Relatives drove a suburban loaded with gas jugs from Fairbanks, Alaska, through Canada, to be there. My grandparents' house sat directly on the parade route, built in the 1930s next door to the farmhouse where my grandmother had grown up, and the two households spent the day running into each other, literally, us kids crossing back and forth between them all afternoon.

This was the day I saw my cousins. I would wake up hoping it wouldn't rain, and it rarely did. There was a potluck, there was my sister's birthday, there was a giant willow tree I climbed barefoot, and the parade came right past our front yard — front row seats, no walking required. My dad and my grandfather marked the flagpole hole in the grass with their own footprints every year so they'd find the same spot again. My grandfather was the parade marshal. I was so proud of him I could burst.

My grandmother stayed inside during the loudest parts, the parade, the fireworks, watching from the window, smiling, waving. Happy, I think. I understand now that being inside looking out and being happy weren't a contradiction for her.

After the parade, we went into town for the carnival, ate too much, ran until we were wrecked, and picked raspberries until I made myself sick on them. Then fireworks. Then next year.

I was never resentful that the day wasn't mine. I was just grateful to be inside something that big.

Nothing broke all at once. It thinned.

You get older and start noticing tones, who doesn't sit near whom, who leaves early, the friction under the small talk. At first, there was no judgment in it. Just an ache that something wasn't right between people I loved, and I didn't yet have words for what I was noticing.

Later, I noticed the shape silence takes. Not what anyone said. What wasn't said. My sister's birthday came every year wrapped in a parade, a flag, a whole town paying attention without trying to. Mine came on an ordinary Wednesday. I was never jealous of her... that's not what this is. I'm only pointing to the contrast and letting it sit there because, for years, I didn't let myself look at it at all.

Six weeks ago, my daughter died. I think of her every day. I am not in crisis. I am just heavy… the specific heaviness of treading water that's turned to quicksand, where nothing about staying afloat works the way it used to.

My youngest doesn't carry any of this. She loves the Fourth of July the way I once did, uncomplicated, present-tense, no ghosts standing at the edge of it. We're going to the festivities today because she wants to go, and some part of me is glad she gets to have the day without my inheritance attached to it.

I keep noticing that the day itself is a kind of mirror. It asks how much you loved by measuring how much its absence weighs. A parade that no longer passes your window. A grandfather, no longer marking a hole in the grass. A daughter, no longer here to see any of it. The day doesn't ask you to perform gratitude for what you had. It just holds up what's gone and waits to see if you'll look.

I used to think grief was the opposite of everything this day stood for... the joy, the flag, the noise, the belonging. I don't think that anymore.

What grief means to me is not negativity, and it is not unpatriotic. It means something mattered a whole hell of a lot. The measure of my grief is the measure of my love.

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