Recently, my grandmother (pictured above with my grandfather) passed away. She’d been battling stage IV pancreatic cancer for fifteen months, had already outlived the prognosis, but the last few months had been rough. On Thursday, October 19th, she was moved to hospice, and on Friday, October 20 my mom called and said my grandmother was close, that she probably wouldn’t make it through the weekend. Immediately, I found people to cover my responsibilities for the next few days, dropped everything, and drove ten hours to be with my family. When I got there Saturday, she was unresponsive. She died two hours later, with my grandfather, my mother, a family friend, and me by her side.
I’ve experienced death before, but never like this. Never so close. It was peaceful—one minute she was wheezing into the oxygen machine, and the next, she just…wasn’t. But that didn’t make it any easier for me or my family. Knowing this, the family friend who was there quietly slipped out while we hugged each other and cried and waited for the hospice nurse to arrive and put off calling the rest of the family, afraid to make it real. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe she was just breathing too quietly for us to hear, maybe her heart was still beating in there—softly, but still beating.
When the nurse arrived, we sat in the den outside my grandparents’ bedroom while she bathed my grandmother. My mom’s brother and his wife were with us now, too. The news played on the TV—“The Donald Trump Show” my grandfather had called it just that morning, laughing while he did—but nobody watched it. I thought about all the times I had been unfairly angry at or annoyed with my grandmother, all the times I should have apologized but didn’t. How, when I’d gotten there earlier that day, I couldn’t bring myself to touch her, not even her hand, because of how unlike herself she looked. She was one of the strongest women I knew, but I was afraid to break her, even more so now that she was gone. I’d never touched a dead person before. I still haven’t, except for when I processed her ashes at the funeral six days later, my sister and brother by my side. I hoped that would make it up to her.
She would have loved the funeral. Big, loud organ music and a full choir in robes rang out “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “For All the Saints,” two of her favorite hymns, and the priest gave a lovely sermon about how nevertheless, she persisted—an inside joke for those of us who knew what a staunch Democrat she was. He spoke about her teaching career and her love of literature, how she passed that on to each of her students, her children, and her grandchildren. Her pen-pal relationships with a Bolivian orphan and a prisoner on death row. Her fine taste in art and food. My grandfather, and the love they shared for forty years. How everything she did was in servitude of Christ: she lived her life the way she believed Jesus did and wanted us to.
I’m not a Christian, I don’t think. In my mind, there’s probably something out there, but I think we as humans can’t truly know what it is. I get into arguments with my boyfriend of three years about this all the time: he’s an atheist, accuses me of being illogical. I’m agnostic, and I accuse him of being intolerant of others’ beliefs. We are not as polar-opposite as we could be, but we’re just different enough for this to sometimes cause us to take a step back and cool off from each other for a few hours.
So, when he took me out for the ultimate comfort food, Waffle House, that night, I expected a lot of things. First, I expected to eat so many hashbrowns I would have to let loose a few belt holes. Second, I expected him to be supportive, but only to the degree of watching me stuff my face and hugging me and telling me everything would be alright. Third, I expected for us to avoid the subject of the afterlife. In highly emotional situations, we’ve discovered this is best.
What I was unable to avoid, though, was the spilling-out of the feelings I’d been keeping in all week: guilt at not having done what I should have over and over again, gratitude at having been this amazing woman’s granddaughter, more guilt at having not fully realized this until it was too late, and, selfishly, anxiety at having missed so much school during my first semester of freshman year. It got to be one of those rambly conversations in which I was the only one actually talking in between sips of my chocolate milk, while he listened and nodded and rubbed my legs, which were reaching across the underside of the table to rest on the booth next to him. When I ran out of things to say, he told me something I never thought I would hear come out of his lips: that my grandmother is in a better place.
At first, I disregarded this, sort of chuckling and reminding him of his own atheism. But he looked at me, all serious, and said something I’ll never forget: “When it comes to sex and death, logic doesn’t matter.”
Ignoring that first part, for the time being, I realized he was right. Death makes logic irrelevant. When I heard my grandmother was dying, I dropped everything and came to be with my family, ended up missing a whole week of school during midterm season. My cousins who live in Colorado did the same, catching the first red-eye flight they could, and my cousin from Alabama rode fifteen hours on a smelly Greyhound to get there in time for the funeral. My grandfather’s house was a wreck, but he was happy to have all of us together under one roof: his three children and their spouses, his eight grandchildren, a few grandchildrens’ significant others, his brother and sister-in-law, his best friend, and all the dogs and cats everyone had brought with them, unable to find a sitter on short notice. It wasn’t logic that had brought us all together. Each of us had jobs, school, duties we wouldn’t have let go of for any reason other than the one we were there: the death of someone we loved.
Love made us forget our lives, and for just a moment, we were nothing but together. And in that moment, that was all that mattered: coming together to celebrate the life of someone who deserves nothing less than to be recognized extensively for all that she gave to us. To Bolivian orphans and death-row inmates, to the church, to my grandfather. To the world.
Image Credit: Feature, Susan Yates, Warren Westcott, Sarah Yeargin