Today would have been my Grandmother's 94th birthday. She passed away a year ago last week. She was obviously very old and towards the end was quite ill. It was one of those passings that had a bit of relief mixed in with the sadness. We knew her death brought her to the peace that eluded her here on earth and freed from her pain. So I guess I thought that after a month or so of grieving I would move on to the occasional fond memory tinged with nostalgia and wistfulness. Gram had lived a full and happy life and my faith and hers assured me that she was in a better place. I have not yet found my way to this warm and painless form of grief. Although there are certainly moments when I pass her picture in my room or use the china she gave me for my wedding that I smile and think of her with only fondness and no sadness more often than not I find my memories bring stabs of tears to my eyes and a slight pain to my chest. I feel like I am doing this wrong. That I should be beyond this pain somehow. Beyond crying as I pass her former nursing home. Beyond losing myself in wishing I could talk to her one more time. Beyond wondering if I was there for her enough, told her I loved her enough. She was a part of my life since I was born. I have never gone more than six months without seeing her in my life and now it has been over a year. I miss her. These paragraphs are something I wrote after her death to help me process it and something I return to every now and then to remember and grieve. I'm not sure how I should be doing this whole grieving thing, but I am working on it.
As I sat next to my grandmother’s dead body I was struck by the relentlessness of life and to be honest I found it quite irritating. She was gone. A lifeless form without animation or dimension. Yet somehow nothing else stopped to honor, to absorb or to witness this moment. My sisters, who had had longer than me to take it in, were chattering about their favorite memories of Gram. They had been here when it happened. I was not. Just one half hour car ride later I, apparently, had missed the moment. Had there been a moment? If so it was over now. In addition to the chatter I could hear our daughters playing downstairs. Their three year old minds uncluttered by momentous questions of life and death. The TV in a nearby roomed droned on as well. One of a thousand daily updates on the sad state of the economy. A truck clunked by under the second story window and a bird twittered on a tree somewhere.
Did no one realize what had happened? Couldn’t the world stop for just a minute, a second, a blink to recognize the loss it had suffered. This frail little woman just shy of her 93rd birthday had given so much, had meant so much. Her kindness, generosity and simple love had touched so many and now it was gone. Couldn’t we just take a breath for her. The hole she left in the world she had graced for almost a century was a shape, size and texture like nothing else. It could not be filled but would stay forever empty. She loved chocolate and appetizers. She was totally deaf in her right ear and her left was not much better. Born in England she had come to the United States as a precocious twelve year old. Until her eyes became too weak she had read through the entire Bible every year for over thirty years. She loved the ocean and small stuffed animals. Even though she couldn’t always remember details of her recent life she could still tell many stories of her early days as a second grade teacher, even the names of the kids in her first class in a two room school house which she shared with another teacher named Gertrude. She liked getting her hair done and playing Skipbo. She was in fact something of a ruthless Skipbo player. My Grandfather died three years ago. They had been married almost sixty years. She didn’t have a middle name. Her only son died thirty five years ago. She liked to tell stories about him. She had one daughter, six grandchildren and six great grandchildren. The great grandkids called her Grandma Nellie.
She loved Jesus. Not in a fire and brimstone kind of way. In a loving kind of way. In a giving your money to missionaries, talking to God everyday and tying to live out the Bible kind of way. Her faith was one of the most simply uncomplicated things I have ever seen. It just was. There were no questions or angsty reservations. No apologies, no doubt. It was the work of many decades by the time I encountered it. Gram had come to her faith as a child and she never lost that childlike quality. She just loved Jesus and more than anything in the whole world she want those she loved to know him and love him as she did. This permeated her whole essence. It was the essential aroma of her being which made itself known on even the briefest encounter. Because of this I know with a certainty akin to the Sun rising in the east that she in heaven. She is free from her fading eyesight and arthritic joints. She no longer experiences the pain of loss or the emptiness of loneliness. She has been made new by her creator. And I can just see as she closed her eyes in this world and opened them in the next who was waiting there for her. He would stand to greet her even as my Grandfather and Uncle eagerly awaited their turn. He would be first and as Gram’s eyes encountered His her face would alight with a joy unknown to anyone in this broken world. He would call her to Him and as he folded His arms around her Jesus would whisper, “well done my good and faithful servant.”
So I suppose even for Gram the relentlessness of life was inescapable if only because death could not hold her. Life intrudes here, robs me of that peaceful, unmoving moment to mourn because it will not wait, it will not stop. But for Gram life’s ceaseless movement has brought her to true peace. Because on the other side of death life has broken through in a deeper, stronger, truer way than the never-ending monotony of change with which we must contend her on earth. So in a way the unalterable nature of life and its refusal to halt is its own testimony to Gram and a reminder of the Life she now enjoys.
Goodbye Gram, I will miss you. In this moment and always.
No comments:
Post a Comment