Word: Silence

Word inspiration: The few awkward seconds before a video call begins. Everyone is present. Nobody is speaking.

The story I have with it:

When I hear the word silence, I do not think of peace.

I think of a particular night.

The night before my grandfather died.

He had been in and out of hospitals for years. A sodium-potassium imbalance had slowly rewritten parts of his life and ours. By the time of his final hospitalisation, none of us were discussing recovery anymore.

We were discussing time.

How much was left.

Every visit to the hospital felt less like a visit and more like a goodbye that refused to arrive.

He had built the house we lived in with his own hands. Yet, towards the end, he seemed to be slowly withdrawing from it and from us.

The foods he loved stopped mattering.

Conversations became shorter.

His body became lighter.

His face somehow younger.

Almost childlike.

As though he was travelling backwards through life.

The night before he passed away, I was studying in the living room.

Everyone had gone to bed.

One light was on.

The house was quiet.

Then quieter.

Then something else.

I still remember looking up at the glass door that faced our garden.

Nothing was there.

And yet I could not shake off the feeling that someone was.

The silence felt suffocating.

Not frightening.

Definitely not threatening.

Just present.

As if it had entered the room and sat down beside me.

I remember sweating.

Trying to focus on my books.

Failing.

Eventually, I shut everything down, switched off the lights, and went to sleep beside my mother.

A few hours later, around six in the morning, she woke me up.

The hospital had called.

My grandfather was gone.

I do not know what happened that night.

Maybe it was anxiety.

Maybe anticipation.

Maybe grief arriving before the news itself.

Or maybe my grandfather did come home one last time before leaving.

I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that every time I hear the word silence, I am back in that living room at three in the morning.

Looking through a glass door.

Listening to a house hold its breath.