What a Clean Bed Taught Me About Grief and Grace

There is a very specific kind of anxiety that comes with being part of a massive immigrant family in the digital age. It lives in the group chat. If you have a family WhatsApp group, you know exactly what I am talking about. Most days, it is a low stakes stream of consciousness. It is photos of nieces and nephews you can barely keep track of, recipes for soup, translated forwards about the weather, and a seemingly infinite supply of praying hands emojis. You get used to the background noise. You mute it for eight hours at a time so you can get through your work day, and you check it when you have the emotional bandwidth to scroll through fifty unread messages.

This past Wednesday afternoon, I had completely ignored my phone. I spent hours out in our garden here in Victoria. Getting my hands into the soil and dealing with the messy, unpredictable reality of the early spring dirt is my favourite way to physically ground myself. There is no performance out there among the roots and the weeds. I was completely disconnected from the digital world, and the house was perfectly quiet.

It was late that evening, after dinner and just before bed, when the peace finally broke.

I had already taken my sleep medication. David and I were winding down, going through the familiar, quiet motions of closing up the house for the night. Then my phone buzzed against the kitchen island countertop.

I unlocked the screen, expecting another photo of a cousin's new baby or a minor update about someone's garden. Instead, the safety of the room evaporated in a fraction of a second.

The messages in the family chat were frantic, heartbroken, and completely shocking. An Uncle had been killed. There had been a terrible car accident on the highway in Mexico, right near their home. The details were scarce, but the finality of that first piece of news was absolute. My Aunt was in the car as well, and she was in critical condition.

I stood there holding the phone in my hand, staring blankly at our kitchen island. My body instantly did what the human animal does when it receives catastrophic news. My heart rate spiked, my breathing became incredibly shallow, and a wave of cortisol flooded my bloodstream. David and I held each other right there in the kitchen. We shared immediate, heavy hugs and a sudden wave of grief.

But the truth is, the full reality of the news simply could not land. The sleep medication was already pulling me under. The heavy, chemical fog of the pills blurred the sharp edges of the tragedy, and my brain just could not process the magnitude of what was happening. We eventually went to bed, holding our breath and hoping for a miracle for my Aunt.

Miracles, however, are rare things.

The next morning, I woke up feeling groggy and entirely disoriented. The news of the accident was sitting somewhere in the back of my mind, but the morning routine took over. I dropped David off at his office and stopped at our favourite cafe nearby to pick up my morning latte. The world was still spinning. People were ordering pastries. The espresso machine was hissing. I had not really had a single, quiet moment to sit with the news from the night before.

I got back into the car and started the drive home. My mind immediately drifted to my very mundane, very normal to-do list. I was thinking about some frustrating insurance paperwork I needed to finish. I was mentally mapping out my upcoming medical appointments. My phone started buzzing on the passenger seat, but I did not think much of it. I figured it was just the usual morning chatter from the the group chat or messages coming in from elsewhere. I was focused on the traffic and the paperwork, so I ignored it and kept driving.

I pulled into our driveway, parked the car, and finally picked up my phone.

I opened the messages, and the words hit me like a physical blow. She did not wake up. The emergency operation in Cuauhtemoc had failed. She was gone.

I sat there in the driver's seat with my coffee getting cold in the cup holder, staring at the steering wheel. The fog of the sleep medication was completely gone now. The mundane worries about insurance forms vanished. I immediately typed out a text to David.

She didn't wake up.

The initial shock of reading those messages in the driveway was entirely expected. That is just biology reacting to a threat. Your nervous system drops everything to process the immediate danger. But what surprised me was what happened after the shock wore off. Over the next few days, sitting in the quiet of my garden, I realised I was carrying an unfamiliar, heavy, and profound sense of deep loss. I was genuinely, deeply grieving.

For a very long time, grief was an emotion I simply did not know how to access.

To understand why this feeling was so unfamiliar to me, you have to understand the mathematics of my family tree. I am the youngest of six children. If you zoom out just one generation, the first cousin count is well over one hundred. When you have a family of that staggering quantity, the cycle of life dictates that there are going to be deaths on a somewhat regular basis. Funerals are not rare anomalies, they are common occurrences.

When I was very young, shortly after my family immigrated to Canada, both of my mother's parents in Bolivia passed away within a span of only a few years. Because I had never been to Bolivia in my short life, I never had the opportunity to meet them. I never knew the people who raised such wonderful children, my own mother included. Their deaths were abstract concepts to me. They existed only as stories told over the dinner table, disconnected from any physical reality I could actually touch. I felt sad for my mother, but I did not feel personal grief.

Years later, when I was around nineteen years old, my Grandpa on my dad's side passed away in Mexico. I was working at the time and had not started my university education yet, so I decided to join my parents for the funeral down in Chihuahua.

It was an incredibly strained, exhausting trip. At that time, my parents and I were separated by a massive, frozen gulf of distance. Only a few years prior, they had handed me a terrifying ultimatum. I was told to deny my sexuality, or I had to leave their home. We were barely speaking. Every interaction was a minefield. But when my Grandpa died, something in me decided that I did not want to regret missing an opportunity for closure. I also wanted to show my parents that I was still willing to be their son, if they would just let me.

We packed into the car, and the air was thick with unspoken tension. The drive down was an agonising exercise in conflict. There were heated arguments about my piercings. There were arguments about my unnatural hair colour. But the most intense, painful argument of the entire trip centred around my foundation makeup and a mirror.

My Grandma kept some very strict, very Orthodox practices. This apparently included the firm belief that mirrors lead to vanity, which is not a good thing. Even though my Grandma knew that other people in the world used mirrors, my parents were absolutely terrified of causing any unnecessary issues. They did not want her to see me using a mirror while she was grieving the loss of her husband. They demanded I leave it behind.

What they did not understand was that the mirror and the makeup were not about vanity at all. At that time in my life, I was suffering from incredibly low self-esteem. I had severe body image issues and was actively battling a devastating eating disorder. When you feel completely out of control of your own body, and when you feel entirely unsafe in your own skin, the ability to curate your face is sometimes the only armour you have. The makeup was a profound safety blanket for me. We argued about it endlessly in the confined, stressful space of the car. Eventually, a tense compromise was reached. I was allowed to bring a small compact mirror, but I had to use it in absolute secret.

The funeral itself was a masterclass in extreme emotional restriction. It was a very Orthodox Mennonite service. When we walked into the church, it was my first experience of being seated entirely separately from my mother. Orthodox Mennonite churches have a men's side and a women's side with absolutely no mixing. I was not expecting to be physically removed from her during the service. While my parents were both raised orthodox, they had made their own decision to leave that church for their own reasons years prior. Sitting there with my father on the men's side, looking across the aisle at my mother, I was just so profoundly glad for that choice. My parents were trailblazers in their own right!

I remember standing there, carrying the secret of my compact mirror in my pocket, trying to perform the role of a quiet, respectful grandson. I was trying desperately not to attract any attention to myself. The environment was physically and psychologically rigid. Monotone pastors recited Bible passages from behind heavy wooden pulpits. Men sat in military-esque black leather boots and severe, dark uniforms.

The architecture of the church itself felt like a weapon. It was stark, cold, and entirely devoid of anything soft or forgiving. It was a space designed to enforce compliance. It was not designed to offer comfort. When a space is built entirely out of hard surfaces, sound bounces violently around the room, creating an acoustic environment that keeps the nervous system on high alert. You cannot relax in a room that feels like a courtroom.

And as I stood there in that harsh, echoing room, I realised something deeply unsettling. Even though I had fond memories of my Grandpa from a very young age, and happy memories from our visits to Mexico growing up, I did not feel much loss. I did not feel much grief. I remember standing in that cold room thinking how odd it was that my emotions were entirely blank. My grandparents had even come up to Canada to live with us for three months one summer, and I genuinely cherished those memories. Yet, staring at the reality of his passing, I felt absolutely nothing.

Perhaps it was the exhausting performance I was putting on. When your nervous system is locked in a state of hypervigilance, constantly scanning the room for threats and judgement, it does not have the bandwidth to process sadness. You cannot grieve when you are busy surviving. Your body simply will not allow it.

In the years that followed that trip, I sank myself deep into school. I was running from an entirely undiagnosed cocktail of anxiety, depression, and severe abandonment issues. My coping mechanism of choice was heavy alcohol consumption. I drank to blur the edges of a world that felt entirely too sharp. My relationship with my parents eventually deteriorated to the point where it shattered completely. I went no contact. I blocked their phone numbers and every other avenue of communication. I built a fortress around myself, and I made sure the walls were incredibly thick. They might have received occasional updates about me from the siblings I remained close with, but I asked absolutely nothing about them.

It was during this dark, silent period that my last grandparent, my Grandma on my dad's side, passed away.

The tragic part is that I did not know. I did not know she was dead for years.

To this day, I cannot remember if someone actually told me and I simply dissociated so severely that my brain deleted the file. I do not know if I was blacked out and lost the memory to the alcohol. Or perhaps, everyone in my life just assumed someone else had told me.

It was years later, maybe four or five years ago now, when I was actively beginning the terrifying, fragile work of repairing my relationship with my parents. They had made the trip out from Steinbach to Winnipeg to have a meal with me at a local restaurant. We were talking, and I casually asked how Grandma was doing on the drive back to my apartment after dinner.

The look of absolute, devastating confusion on their faces broke my heart. I instantly knew the answer before they even spoke, but the information was completely new to me. It felt like the floor had dropped out from under my feet.

More so than with my Grandpa, I had incredibly vivid, sensory memories of my Grandma. I remember her cooking the most delicious carrot soup. I remember her smile. I remember the specific, comforting way she smelled. Most of all, I remember the auditory environment of her home. I remember the way the rain would sound falling on their tin metal roof, striking the metal like thousands of tiny percussion instruments. It is one of the most soothing acoustic memories of my childhood. I loved staying at their place before we moved to Canada because I always felt so welcome there. They had an amazing, sprawling willow tree out in their front yard that my siblings and I spent hours climbing. Their home was a soft landing.

Those same warm, complicated, and painfully grieving feelings are exactly what re-emerged when I received the news about my Uncle and Aunt this past week.

You see, I may have a massive family, but not all aunts and uncles are made equally.

In the culture I grew up in, Mennonite men are taught from birth that stoicism is the ultimate virtue. They are instructed to repress emotion at all costs. Often, these men are actually very kind and incredibly softhearted, but you would never be able to tell by looking at them or even knowing them in the community. It is a profound tragedy. They repress their most beautiful traits until those traits are buried under miles of hardened earth, and then they ingrain that exact same repression into generation after generation of boys. It means that young men grow up without any emotional role models. Their only template for manhood is the strict, unyielding farm owner.

Thankfully, the cycle is breaking. My siblings all have children of their own now, and I watch how warmly and compassionately they interact with their kids. I am even seeing how my own parents have picked up on this shift, becoming much warmer, much gentler, and generally more accepting.

Mennonite women, on the other hand, are bred for a very specific, traditional role. They are raised to be housewives and housekeepers. Many Mennonite mothers are just as warm, kind, and cuddly as any parent you would find here in Canada, at least behind closed doors. But there were others who were not. There were the ones who were quick to reach for the leather belt or the hard wooden hairbrush the second you stepped out of line. The environment was often predicated on fear and strict behavioural control.

My Aunt and Uncle were different. They were both outwardly, reliably kind.

When we lived in Mexico, they were definitely better off financially than my family, and we visited them quite regularly. We were never treated like a burden. We were always warmly invited inside and told to make ourselves completely at home. Unlike at our own house, they kept cases of that amazing, thick glass bottle Mexican soda stacked high in their garage, and it was always up for grabs.

One of my greatest memories of them involves visiting their farm when I was a teenager. They lived in a community we called Oasis, a name that felt entirely literal because they were quite practically farming in the desert. Whenever my parents brought up planning a trip to Mexico, the stop at their place was always a major highlight of mine.

In Mennonite culture, or at least my Mexican Mennonite family, we make a dish we call Disco. We still enjoy it at family gatherings today. For those who do not know, a disco or discada is an incredible culinary experience. The name comes from the cooking vessel itself, which is essentially a repurposed agricultural plough disc. The heavy steel disc is often fitted with handles and legs, acting as a massive, slightly concave outdoor wok over a roaring propane flame.

When we would visit their farm, we would always have a huge gathering. My uncle and the other men would stand outside around the flame, manning the Disco to cook the meat. They would cook down bacon, ground beef, steak, onions, and bright green jalapeños. The smell of the rendered fat and the roasting peppers would drift across the entire yard. Meanwhile, my aunt and the women would be inside the house, prepping all the fresh vegetables, warming the tortillas, and chatting in the kitchen.

While the adults cooked, us boys were riding around on four-wheelers or trying to get into trouble otherwise. I always loved having my cousin, who was my age, drive me around their sprawling farmland. He would point out exactly what they were growing in the desert soil, showing me acres upon acres of soya beans, peanuts, and massive watermelons. The environment was so alive. It was loud, it was messy, it was vibrant, and it was deeply, fundamentally joyful. It was the exact opposite of that cold, rigid church.

But there is another specific memory of my Aunt that has been playing on a loop in my mind all week, one that speaks directly to why I view the built environment the way I do.

It happened one summer when I was 9 or 10 years old. We were visiting and staying at their house. During the day, I had fallen severely ill from heat stroke. It was so bad that I ended up completely passing out and fainting during a church service. Later that night, I was sleeping in a guest bed at my Aunt and Uncle's house. I woke up suddenly in the pitch black, my body heaving, and violently threw up my entire dinner all over the bed.

It was a massive, horrific, gross mess.

Laying there in the dark, shivering and terrified, my mind immediately raced to the worst case scenario. My nervous system braced for impact. I waited for the yelling. I waited for the anger. I waited to be told that this was somehow my fault, that I was careless, that I was bad. That was the response my biology had been trained to expect when I made a mistake or created a mess.

But I was not at one of those homes.

My cousin, who was sleeping in the other bed in the room, ran to get my Aunt. She rushed into the room, and the very first thing she did was check my face. She checked to make sure I was breathing properly, making sure I did not need emergency medical attention.

And then, she did something revolutionary. She helped me get cleaned up. She found me fresh, clean clothes. She walked me down the hall and tucked me into fresh, soft bedding in an entirely different room.

She did all of this with absolutely no fuss whatsoever. There were no heavy sighs of annoyance. There was no scolding. There was no guilt trip about the terrible laundry situation she would have to deal with in the morning. She just smoothed the blankets over me, gently told me to go back to sleep if I could, and walked back down the hall to clean up the mess I had made.

It was this specific flavour of compassion and kindness that, for me, was entirely exceptional.

It was not that everyone else in my life was outwardly cold and unfriendly, but very few were genuinely warm and nurturing either. In that specific moment, when I was physically sick, terrified, and incredibly vulnerable, my Aunt made me feel completely taken care of. She showed me true, radical kindness in a community where softness was usually viewed not as a virtue, but as a dangerous weakness. I will remember the safety of that clean bed for the rest of my life.

I did not remain close with my Aunt and Uncle over the years. Our lives took very different paths, and I only received the occasional update about them, their children, and their grandchildren through my parents. But they have always occupied a very special, protected place in my heart.

I am not surprised that, because of these deeply heartwarming memories, I am feeling their loss as intensely as I am right now. It hurts, but it is a clean hurt.

Sitting here in Victoria with David, looking out at our messy, imperfect garden, I am just so overwhelmingly grateful. I am grateful that I am sober today. I am grateful that I no longer have to build thick, numb walls around myself just to survive a Wednesday evening. I am grateful that I have the biological and emotional capacity to actually feel all of these feelings genuinely, without needing to blur the edges with a drink.

I am also profoundly grateful that I can share in this loss with my siblings and my parents. We have spent the last few days sharing really lovely, warm memories of them. My family is softening, and I am softening right along with them. We are unlearning the stoicism. We are learning how to be soft landings for each other.

My Aunt and Uncle will be greatly missed. But the grace they showed a terrified, sick kid in the middle of the night is something I carry with me into every single room I walk into.

I'm Erns.

Stay safe, stay froh.