.jpg)
If you looked across any place I spend much time you'd find an anthropological study about my genetic line. The stacks of dishes, the groupings of coffee cups, the piles of clothes, the binder of environmental news clippings. That is a line that threads back through my genes, through my parent's and to my paternal grandparents. And so it is hard this week looking at the dishes, the cups, the clothing and the clippings to not think about the part of my family we lost last week.
Amid the chaos of the play ending and holidays stretching in and out our family was facing something more profound. My parents got word on the morning of Saturday the 26th and told me after they saw the play that night: my Dad's Mom's health might be failing. My parents headed south early the next morning and raced to Oakland. Five days later she died, surrounded by three of her four sons, her husband of over 60 years and priests and monks and ministers. She died in her home. A home where each morning she went outside with my grandpa and watched the sun rise. Where each evening they went out and watched the sun set. Coffee cups perched in the hands that weren't holding each others. She died as each of us hopes to die: surrounded by the love we helped create in this world.
I never really got to know my Grandmother as an adult. But I knew her all through my childhood. They spent summers in Bandon, and we spent a lot of time there. When their health began to require warmer weather, they headed to their winter home in the Oakland hills. My Dad shut our company's website down for an entire day accidentally when he set up a web cam at the Bandon property so that my Grandparents could watch the sunset over the ocean. The next time we visited them in California, they had print outs, cheap office paper, of vivid sunsets taped all over their walls.
Even though my Grandma was such a positive support in my life, I was more than fully aware the difficulty she created for my Mom. Mom never truly felt welcomed into that family. My mother is from business entrepreneurs. People who poured their sweat and courage and life into creating something with their own two hands. This life my Grandmother could never understand. She thought the noble life was spent in the university, the church or social issues. Being poor but spending your life as a servant was deemed more valuable than any business you built. And yet Grandma spent her adult life wealthy and her life at the end was much more pleasant because of it. And if she had thought about it a bit more, maybe she would have realized that the way she expressed these lofty ideals isolated and alienated the woman my father loved.
Grandma contracted polio in the hospital after her first pregnancy. The first of four boys. And she raised those boys from a wheelchair and from crutches. She traveled the world untethered by this turn of history. She climbed mountains, crossed borders, swam. The bravery she embodied on a daily basis is something I could never appreciate as a child. It is something I wish I had seen more clearly now.
She took pictures of everything. Everything. You just woke up with crusty drool on your chin? Click. Stuffing your face? Click. Tripped and bleeding. Click Click. And then she'd show them to every family member and friend that came to visit. Post them on her refrigerator.
She'd also hold your hand. This was a trait we children dreaded. If you got too close she'd latch onto your hand and you'd be there, stuck, for an hour. Half standing half sitting awkwardly as Grandma just patted your hand and smiled.
She sent terrible sweaters for Christmas. Often matching my sister and I in bright pink knits with those little fabric balls attached at random. My parents would make us take pictures with them smiling. They'd send the pictures off the next week. We'd pass around a phone and say thank you long distance.
Every picture. Every hand holding. Every terrible Christmas sweater. God she loved us.
It's hard to believe she's gone, even though she was dying for years. The brain going. The body not strong to begin with. But they had a caretaker for her, and Grandpa still would help her in and out of bed and then go out with her at sunrise and watch that sun, hand in hand, until the end. I can't imagine how he feels now, sitting in that house, after decades of holding her hand at dawn, to have her gone.
Her life will not be the life I lead, but it is one of the luckiest lives I know. Every life is hard, but she was a happy person and happy people face those trials differently than the rest of us. It's not that they suffer less, it's that they deal with their suffering in a way that makes it appear, to the outside, as less. There are lessons to be learned here. I have had a beautiful example set.
A few nights ago, after Z and I returned from a weekend with friends, I panicked at the thought that I had given to Goodwill the one thing she had given me. I searched my studio up and down for this small candy bowl. I hadn't wanted it a the time of gifting. I found a similar one within the piles but I think, alas, Grandma's I gave away. I've spent the last few days trying to push back the sadness that that one piece of arbitrary glass now brings. But then today I found some pictures of my Grandparents from many years ago. Wedding pictures. Dating pictures. Graduating college pictures. I looked at them for a very long time, and I noticed something in the shape of her cheeks. I've always known this to be true but today it took on a new significance: the shape of her face is the shape of mine. Or at least it's where I get mine. This is a part of my body that I have scorned for years, but this now represents a piece of her I have been allowed to carry on. No more will I curse this face in mirrors or in photographs. No longer will I wish these cheeks to look like others, because this is her. This is a part of her that lives within me.
I'm not yet ready to say goodbye to her. Even after so many years of cutting them off, slowly, I'm still not actually ready to say goodbye. But her death has changed me. She impacted the way I lived as a child. Her death has impacted how I will live as an adult.
Grandma filled their house with trinkets. Every wall, every table covered with something. One Grandparent could probably tell you where each item came from. But there was a saying taped just inside the dining room that caught my eye years ago and I scribbled it down. It has new meaning now that's she's gone.
"Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because dawn has come." (Rabindranath Tagore)
To Grandma. Goodnight.
beautiful.
ReplyDelete