On the Day I Needed a Little Serendipity, There It Was

Two years ago this week, my grandmother died.  I think I've written this line to start blog posts over and over again all week, only to erase them and write about something else.  I couldn't do it. I wanted to, but I couldn't. I just didn't know how to write about it.

Losing my grandmother was hard.  She was more like a mother to me than a grandmother and we had all the complexities of a mother/daughter relationship.  The love, the fury, the frustration, the complete and total comfort.  My grandmother and I had a total understanding of each other and a complete misunderstanding of each other. I respected her and she drove me crazy.  She respected me and I drove her crazy.  In this way, our relationship was very special and also comfortingly typical.

As I've mentioned in the blog before, my grandmother had breast cancer when she was 42.  She survived this and lived for many, many years with only scars and memories of it.  When she was in her 80s it returned and wasn't caught until it was in the later stages.  She was given the option of chemo, but chose not to take it. From that point on, we knew the clock was ticking. Her death would come within six to nine months later.

When you're young and death seems so far from you, in the attempt to be deep and insightful, you'll often ask each other, "If you had a limited amount of time to live, what would you do?" The answers are always things like "travel the world" and "sky dive." Stuff like that.

The truth is, when you know your death date is near, you're usually too sick to do all of that stuff. You're tired, you ache.  Often your mind is muddled and confused. Most of all, you're frightened at the unreality of this very real and horrible thing.  You are going to die. What does that even mean? And what did life mean? What just happened here?

My grandmother struggled with this questions a lot during the first few months after her diagnosis. She would ask me what she had accomplished. She would ask me why we couldn't just pray the cancer away.  She would ask me what it all means.  I didn't have answers, but the questions stayed with me.  As much as a moment from when my grandfather died has always haunted me.

I wasn't there when  this happened, but my grandmother told me that when my grandfather was dying in the hospital, she and their preacher were standing beside him. He was sleeping but woke up and looked at the preacher. "It's all a lie," he said to him. "Why didn't you tell me it was all a lie?"

I think this moment haunted my grandmother as well. I know she thought about it a lot during those months, the ambiguous but very provocative accusation to the preacher.   The preacher is one of the few rather honest people I know, so I'm rather curious about that statement myself.

Gramma also thought a lot about the deaths before her. Her parents, most of her brothers and sisters. She was one of eight children. During the last year of her life, four were still alive. By the time she died, only two remained and one of them died very soon after.  The last one passed away during December of this year.  That's one of the oddest facts about a long life. You begin it seeing "family" as one set of people and end it with "family" being an other group.

When Gramma died, the situation is what many people describe as ideal for dying. She was with people who loved her. She had music. She was in her own bed.  As she passed, we were telling her we loved her. I was holding her hand.

Since that moment, I've struggled with it.  Not just losing her. The grief isn't as raw as it used to be, but grief never leaves you completely.  No, it is the fact that I was there and I saw her die. I was touching her, grasping onto her, as she died. I felt her go cold.

For two years now, this has disturbed me. Intellectually, I knew it shouldn't have.  It was what she wanted. It was perfectly natural. I did nothing wrong.

I've felt wrong about it though. I'd never seen someone die before. I'd never felt that.  There is so much about our society that is clinical now. Death usually happens in a very sanitary and separated way from us.  For most of our existence as humans this wasn't the case, but it most often is now.

While the taboo part of it bothered me, there was more to it than that.  I didn't know how to explain it or even how to conceptualize it where I could make peace with it. I had done......something. But what? I was changed......but why?

Then today, by complete random chance, I saw this.

This wasn't a show I followed, so I'd never seen the ending.  Watching this though, I understood why I was so broken about holding Gramma's hand and watching her die.

Death is a holy thing.  It is one of the few moments in the life of any human when we witness a complete mystery.  I not only watched this happen, but I was touching the mystery. I was part of it, the last link between this space and what comes next.

I've finally accepted that it's okay to be disturbed by this.  Something this fundamental should alter who and what I am. Touching death changed me.  And as much as it might seem that it would make me fear my own death more, I actually accepted it.

I don't know what my grandfather meant about it all being a lie. I don't know what my grandmother was thinking as she grew cold against my hand.  I just know that the reality of death is now something I understand far more. I also know it's time to make peace with the events surrounding the deaths of these two people.