There is no clear script for what comes next besides suffering.
“My colleague, Martha, was sitting not too far from me, and she said, are you okay? And I said, I just found my grandma’s hair. And Martha, it was really sweet—I adore Martha and we’re friends, but she didn’t know how to react. She was like, that’s great. And then she’s like, no, that’s not good. She just embraced me.”
After that, Meredith left the Peabody and her matriarchs’ hair in it.
“I just went home that day after work. And my friend came home with me. And we grabbed her dog, because dogs are very healing. And we went to the ocean. And I sat there and just kind of thought about things and pet her dog and just hung out.”
The moment didn’t stay contained to that day. It brought back everything tied to her grandmother.
“There was so much grief around my grandma dying… all that mourning that I did when she died in ‘98, now just reliving all of it. I had planned to get married in North Dakota by her house so she could come to my wedding, and she died two months before.”
She kept thinking about what her grandmother might have remembered.
“I often wondered, I wish I could ask my grandma, do you remember this day? Do you remember when they lined you up and cut pieces of your hair?”
“But then I also thought, they cut their hair like every other month. So they probably didn’t even know this had been shipped off to Colorado for a study.”