Elegy

This is one of the hardest things I have ever had to write.  Part of me says I should maybe wait a little longer, when it isn't so raw and maybe I'm able to process things a bit better.  But then the other part tells me that I should do it now, exactly because it is raw, and that is the way these things are supposed to feel.

My amazing, woman-of-steel Grandma passed away this past week.

When my Grandpa passed, two Septembers ago, I was half a world away.  My family wasn't even able to tell me until a day after it happened.  This time was different.

My Mom called me out of bed shortly before 7:00 AM.  My Grandma was suffering from another "heart spasm", as we called them.  She'd had them before, and I settled in to wait this one out for a few hours until it passed and she was willing and able to rest again.  That isn't what happened this time.  And around 9:00 I started making calls.  The hospice nurse arrived.  She made Grandma comfortable.  The family began to arrive in ones and twos.

There is nothing I can say that even comes close to trying to explain that morning.  How I had to step out into the hallway for a minute after Grandma called out for Bob, her husband and my Grandpa, to come and help her.  How she prayed.  I know she was afraid.  I know she wasn't ready to accept that this was the end, because when the nurse and my Mom and I reminded her that she would be going to a place where she would see her husband and loved ones again, she looked at us all with a flash of her old fire and said quite clearly: "Well I'm not going anyplace."

It was only three hours later that my Aunt Diane told us all waiting outside that Grandma's breathing had changed.  And around noon Grandma finally decided that she had fought against this for long enough.  I consider it a blessing beyond count or price that I was able to be there.

What happens at that moment?  Where do we go?  What happens when that spark winks out, that invisible, unfindable bit that makes each of us ever so much more than protein and carbon?  And travels somewhere... else.  I don't know where that place is.  But my Grandma did.  She believed that she knew exactly where she was going.  And I guess I can believe in her belief, if nothing else.

The next few days are kind of a blur.  It is a sad dark joke that honestly only minutes after it happens, before anyone even really has a chance to process, that events must immediately be set into motion.  Work must be done.  In your head and heart the world might be collapsing, but there are arrangements to make, flowers to order, people to be called.  Dinners to make.  Lawyers to be notified.  Airport pickups to be arranged and mattresses brought up from the garage to create an appropriate number of sleeping spaces.

But finally things are winding down.  I leave with my mother and father to go back to Nova tomorrow.  Once again HOME has become a sort of Camelot, a Buddhist mountian top, the Sanctum Sanctorum.  I'm looking forward to quietness, even if it won't be for long.  Lots of things have changed in my world, on several different fronts.  But this post is only about one thing.  Or one person.

This is the part where I remember her.

I remember her indefatigable strength.  I remember my Mom telling me about how she would feed lunch to five children with one can of tuna.  I remember how she used to make Thanksgiving dinner for 30 people in a hostel-sized kitchen.  I remember she told my sister and me that "A woman can have secrets.", with a glint in her eye, and how we always wanted to ask her what that glint was for, but never did.  I remember how she held my hands and would not let them go when I first came to see her the day before she left the nursing home.

The day before she died she wanted to set her hair in rollers, because that's what she had always done, for the past 80 or 85 years most likely.  And even though her hands shook and her arms were too weak to reach up to the top of her head, she was determined to do it herself.  My Mom put a helping hand under her elbow and helped her those extra crucial inches.

The most simultaneously incredible and heartbreaking thing about my Grandma was that she had a side to her that so few people saw.  She was a wife and mother, a seamstress, a cook, a mediator, a nurse, and a fearsome housekeeper.  She was also a painter and a poet, and while she permitted her beautiful artworks to be displayed in local shows and competitions, hung around her home, and gifted to  her children, her poetry she kept largely hidden away.  I'm sure she had a good reason for doing so, even if she never told any of us what that reason was.  Or hell, maybe she did confide in someone once, and that person is keeping her secret.  As well he should.

So I hope my Grandma does not mind, but I'm going to close this elegy by sharing one of my favorite poems by Elizabeth Alice O'Connor.  I think it speaks well of the legacy she left behind.

"A Mother in Retirement"

I don't get up early anymore,
(Not having to do a loving chore).

No need to clean walls as much,
No smudges at the height little hands can touch.

I don't have to look through the oven door.
No need for fancy cakes to store.

No noise to hush, or quiet a hassle.
All have gone to their own little castle.

There's time to sit around and read.
I'd rather have five mouths to feed.

Time drags by -- I look out the door.
How did I do so much before?

I've not forgotten how to sew.
Just don't have many places to go.

I feel fine.  My health is good.
Still can do the things I should.

Days don't have such joy in store.
I don't get up early, anymore.

-- by: Elizabeth O'Connor 

And the thing is, even after she "retired", I never saw that woman rest.

Grandma, rest now.  Your children, their children, and their children carry the love and the strength they all learned from you.  And I believe I'll be seeing you again, to ask those questions I always wanted to, and didn't.