What we are has much to do with where we came from.
I lost my grandmother tonight. Dan leaves these photos up so as I can write on them when I feel like it. I'll have more thoughts on her, but I felt the need to get some out now.
This picture was taken days before the last time that I saw her. On this day, our friends found this river and we followed in suit. My little family packed our chairs and our novels and we sat in search of home (myself especially). Peekay and I waded in the cold water with the last bit of sun on our shoulders. I walked straight while he swam in the current until we felt the warm sand on the other side. I smelled the air, and we watched the train. Peek grew angry at a leashed cat on the far bank and I thanked God for the air and the water and the world. I was happy to have a new hat. I was nervous to go to Texas.
I flew to family unseen for some years. Very old fond memories can not mend the damages that time will cause. I felt a stranger to them all. I felt myself trying hard to be friendly and I felt myself a fool. We got in the car to drive to the old town that lay dying around my grandparents. We walked through the double doors of their ruined house and there they were.
She hugged me tight and I was no longer a stranger, though the mass of guilt that had built on my heart for years shuddered threw my chest and I felt the pain at lost time. There is no remedy to that lack of presence. But she hugged me still and I felt that loveliest love that I had always felt in her presence. My mind raced back to the chocolates, to her pointing at my toes to tell me they were wonderful, to her simply speaking, and to that profound sense of safety found in her simplification of life.
This visit was the first one in which my grandparents did not smother me with attention. I noticed this as I sat watching them. It struck me hard—they were dying. Things being said and things being realized are two vastly different phenomena. It was their time. She was in great pain. He was very lost. I had never seen any one in so much pain as I saw her in those days by their bedside. I watched my grandfather weep and I held my grandmother's hand.
Even in our last moments together, she made me laugh. She never mentioned the pain. She told me some stories. I ‘d like to think that we both considered this world wonderful, and that I got my happy viewpoint on the little things from her.
I do not contain the words to describe her life and I cannot say who she was. I am simply unable. But I will say that there has never been a person that represented home to me as she did. There is no person that shed such warmth as she. Yet—she was a force to be reckoned with. She had an edge. In my last days with her, I saw the greatest strength in any person that I may ever see. She was a woman fighting death with grace. When we said goodbye, I knew it was goodbye forever.
As I sit here tonight, there is a great deal of sadness. I worry for her children. I worry for her late husband. I am saddened that my wife will never meet her. I am saddened that she will never pull on my children’s toes. But it is not all sadness. I think of her now, without pain, flying away on the wind, and I smile. After all, she is the only person to ever successfully argue the existence of God to me—on a day of old film and chocolates with coffee—one that I cannot forget now, so I expect to see her up there smiling. It should give us hope, just as she did.
And though she is gone, her voice still sings to me in that wind, and it is the most melodious sound I think I shall ever find.
Her last weary days are gone. She is free.