Saturday, December 29, 2018
The following was written by my daughter, Heathyre, for her grandmother.
I told my mom at some point over this weekend that death is definitely not like it is portrayed on TV and the movies. In that world everyone gathers around and suddenly the person is gone, so peacefully that no one notices that they’ve died. Our reality, for first my Grandpa (A.K.A. the Old Man) and now my Grandma, is days of agonizing waiting with shallow, labored, congested breathing and a body breaking down before our eyes.
The morning before my grandmother died, I had the heartbreaking honor of having a few hours alone with her. Whether everyone really had errands to run and I was helping out by taking a shift, or that’s just what they said so that I could have some guilt-free time alone with Grandma, I’m not really sure. There is an intensity to that situation that I can’t quite describe. My nervous nature watched every hard-fought breath and evaluated whether her breathing was getting worse and whether I should call someone. Hoping to comfort my Grandmother, and distract myself from focusing on her breathing, I read to her and sang to her. She made some noises while I read, and I couldn’t tell if she really hated the book, wanted to talk about the book, or was just reacting, without any control, to what was happening in her body. She was pretty quiet while I sang and a peace settled on us, that I know came from God, during some of those songs.
Then, because I would never have the chance again, and I knew it, I talked to her about Jesus. I knew I was talking to someone who had been talking about Jesus my whole life, but the Jesus she talked about and the Jesus I know were not the same. When I was in college, a friend of mine was getting his Master’s at Catholic University in D.C. He took me to the cathedral and Jesus was fiercely portrayed on the back wall with a mild and loving Mary an archway or two up from Jesus. That was when I understood the Jesus that my Grandmother knew. The idea of a Jesus who you are never enough for and need to be shielded from. Not the Jesus I talked to everyday, literally about everything, whose arms I could almost physically feel around me in my most awful, painful moments. Grandma would never, ever let me talk to her about this. We talked about her high school friends, how much she wanted Grandpa’s attention on the train before they started dating, how much she wanted the hugs she never got as a child, how a young nun made her feel so loved and then tragically died of cancer, how she had never seen a pregnant woman before she was 18, -and hence was scared to death when the nurses sent her home with a brand-new Aunt Linda- how Grandpa missed her so much he would speed home to see her on leave- scaring her to DEATH, how she wished that she had known that snuggling her children was more important than a clean house when they were young instead of realizing it when it was too late. She told me so many things that I carried with me every day. (When my kids were tiny and we were so broke, I remembered her telling me about rocking her babies at night and crying when the heat kicked on because she didn’t know how they would pay the gas bill. I was comforted knowing that being broke didn’t mean I was a failure, because my Grandma wasn’t a failure and she had been there, too. It was just something we went through, not something that defined who we were. With all the things we could talk about, we could never talk about Jesus. Here was my chance, and if there was a chance she could hear me, I wasn’t going to miss it. I knew I had to keep it short, and from memory, because I didn’t have my Bible with me. So, I told her two things: Jesus said He is THE way, THE truth, THE life and that no one comes to the Father but by him. It doesn’t say that Jesus is part of the way, but he is the whole way. And, that when Jesus died, He said ‘It is finished.’ It’s not that he started something we need to finish, it says He finished it. He made the way for our salvation totally on His own. He was tortured, because He loves us, to finish the way for our salvation. I don’t know if she heard me. I was praying she did. Not because it was a last-ditch effort to indoctrinate my Grandmother, but because it was my only chance to tell her that she could be free and just how much Jesus loved her. That she didn’t need to work for what was already hers to have. Selfishly it was because I can’t ever let her go and that I need to know that when my life is over, it’s really just beginning with her in my eternity.
