on death

My grandmother died on a Friday. She died in her home, in her bed, a newly started book still in her hands. I got a message Saturday night; I went to her house Wednesday afternoon. The property manager let me into her building, the entire hallway smelled of bedwetting and dog food. Somehow though the smell didn’t bother me; the innocent turning of age marked by water stains on carpets and blind dogs. Set outside my nana’s door was a small altar built by people in her building. There were four or five small electric candles, and a note that said, “love follows you on your journey”. There were a few signatures on the card, none of which I knew. The manager that led me into the unit was young, maybe a few years older than myself. I found myself wondering how she got into this position of running a living center for folks easily three or four times her age. I wondered if she enjoyed it, and I also wondered if she had to let family into the units of deceased loved ones often. Her eyes, and the eyes of every other person I met that day, who knew who I was and what I was there to do, gazed unpressingly upon me with a whimpering pity. Eyes that said “I’m sorry” with no verbal entourage, and by effect no demand for response or demand to be shown what must be my stupendous pile of grief. It was nice, nicer than I’d readily admit, to be pitied in such a quiet way.

My grandmother’s apartment was modest, with a kitchen inside of a living room inside of a hallway, leading to a bedroom too small for the standing arrangement of furniture. It was too small to have all her shoes laid out on the floor. Too small for a vanity next to a bookshelf next to a nightstand. The bed was situated in the middle of the room, and I couldn’t quite determine if that had been to her liking or a byproduct of several police officers climbing in her bedroom window to take her body “elsewhere”. I couldn’t remember how it was before, when the tv was on and she needed help with her mobile banking. The book she had been reading was now molded to her last page, and a pair of pajama bottoms were hung over the crimson red railing of the bedframe. She had magazine clippings of articles divulging new books that readers were raving about, titles circled and highlighted. She had a framed drawing of what appeared to be two trolls conversing underneath a tree, titled “Day Six”, and a framed poem, “Warning” by Jenny Joseph. I sat on her bed after folding the blankets and sheets. I opened the window, then shut it again. I lit candles. I wept.

Her kitchen was strewn with newly bought or barely touched food. An unopened box of wine, five bags of chips that were all open but nearly full, a freezer overflowing with still-packaged ice cream, discounted donuts, untouched on the counter. There was a pot of coffee still on the heater, and a magnet on the fridge that read “what a fucked-up time to be alive”. There was a new sweater for her new dog, and new food for her cat. There was a package of unopened mascara in the bathroom, and a note taped to the wall: “Jerry, I need you. – Nancy”. Everything about the room read that she would be back in a minute, she was on a walk, maybe running late (which she never actually was) and would finish the coffee later. She would water the plants, put on the make-up, and maybe have a glass of wine with whoever the hell Jerry was. She would call me back.

            My grandmother talked often about how she was going to die. Soon, she’d say, and we’d always shrug it off. She said it with a clarity and a bluntness that imbibed such carelessness into the inevitable; this was the way it was, and she would go when she was ready. She was ill in the way that most older folks are, but not ill enough for any of her auto-obituaries to stunt my perceived invincibility of her. She was independent, social, capable of caring for animals and herself. She drove herself places and flirted with waiters. She went to the movies, and to the bars. These factors compel me to argue with Death, to say under my breath that it doesn’t make sense. When I am sitting, when I am sitting and crying, when I am sitting and crying and thinking of her, these factors pin tiny hands against imaginary walls and shake the shoulders of Death’s receptionist. Death meets me in the waiting room and wraps Her arms around me before reminding me there is no undoing. Death itself is not a rarity. Death unexpected, unprovoked, and unseen is also not a rarity. Death is an intrinsic partner within Life’s web, and Death is not the enemy. It is tempting to be angry, to be regretful. It is tempting to enter the portal of “if I had known”. And yet this portal, this vacuum into impossibilities, waters the mouths of those selves within me that cannot grasp the necessity of allowance. I cannot fight with Death once They have set Their course, both because I am an “I”, and because I do not want to disturb waters of rest in my digging through mud for lost stones.

            The final day I saw my grandmother we “coincidentally” talked a lot about Death. We talked about grief, and the way the mind compounds grief in its arguments and groveling. I asked her what she thought about dying, and if she was afraid. She told me she was not, and that she didn’t pay much attention to it but wasn’t naïve to its approach. We talked about illness, and the pleading for life sometimes ignorant of the kind of life afforded. We talked about choice and when, if ever, to pull the plug. We talked about letting go. When I drove her home that day, she was looking out the window as she told me, in all seriousness, to “enjoy every moment of my life, because before [I] know it, time is going to fly by”. I chuckled at her sincerity, putting this version of her in my pocket to remember later on. I had not known then that this would be our last conversation, although in retrospect its perfection was compelling to such a finding. I am reminded in her “absence” of the duty of Loving, the universal purpose of form. Death becomes an agent of encouragement, sometimes violent and reigning, but never innately evil. Death becomes an invitation into the risk of deepening, a reminder of its own worth, and hopefully, its necessity. I do not want to be unmoved by Death, as to be so is to be unmoved by Life. However, I do not want to be struck down by Death, I do not want to deny it or fight with it. I do not want to be crippled by it. I do not want to become so distracted by my own refusal that I miss the opportunity to carry her to the threshold, to open and quiet enough that I may speak with her, that I may comfort her and be comforted by her. Death in Its gentleness asks to be ritualized, to be forgiven for the predecessors of Its arrival, and welcomed not as a thief but as a Mother. When the suffering of the body or the being becomes too much, Death lifts the boulder from Sisyphus’s mountain and permits him to close his eyes. Death bakes bread, and lights candles in a great untouchable hallway, and welcomes us into the Mystery of Beyond. I cannot say for sure if my grandmother was suffering in any extraordinary way, but I can say that the artifacts of her life whisper promises of contentment, of a life settled into, of Love well spent. I can say that I trust Death to walk with her, to accompany her to wherever it is she is going.