It was a six-week slog, a marathon of emotional stamina, a To Do List that didn’t need writing down. Since I last posted, my Grandmother spent untold hours suffering both loudly and silently. Sometimes I was by her side, holding her hand, wiping her nose or feeding her pureed chicken and green beans, when all she really wanted was red jello. Other times I was driving to where she was or toward what she needed, listening to the same mysteriously soothing song on repeat for hours.
Her arms and legs swelled like water balloons, her chest flooded with fluid her heart was too weary to pump away. She teetered often between consciousness, sleep and heaven, and somehow, by the same sheer determination that sustained her through nearly a century in the rural Mississippi hill country, she survived… and came home.
The long season of hospital rooms, stiffened backs and unnoticed holiday décor ended with few answered questions and a resolve to celebrate good days, good moments, whenever they can be found. The hospital bed where she now spends her days is under Dad’s roof, shrouded in soft lamplight, across from a fireplace, with nurses who tend only to her.
Death is like a canvas tote bag they sent us home with, hanging unused on a doorknob, over a bedrail, in long silences. (It will get used one day, though. We’d better keep it.)
For weeks, all I had thought about was life ending, growing older, how it sucks when the body gives out before the mind, certainly before the spirit. But then, the new bodies, the new babies, began to blossom. Like the spring flowers, many of them came early, some late, but all of them… beautiful new beginnings. A girl. A boy. Another boy. A boy again. Two girls at once. It was a boom like the buds on my neighbor’s tulip tree, daffodils exploding yellow in my yard.
There was an engagement, a wedding, wedding parties. A new puppy around the corner. My garden seed catalogs arrived. The days were unseasonably warm for so long that I forgot that it was winter. Sandals found unpainted toes.
Until the rains today brought a chill, and the phone rang with news of another beloved aging body, stumbling. Sirens, a gurney, a hospital… Still raining, another call. This time a baby coos in the background, a new mother oozes joy.
I read yesterday that the Book of Hebrews could have been written by a woman. If she was indeed a she, she was a list maker, too. Perhaps it was at time of needing "evidence of things unseen" that she listed all those folks in Chapter 11 who had acted in faith, baby steps and big steps alike. They were old and young, the holy and the hellions, but by transcribing their tales she darkened their fingerprint on history. Their legacies intertwine with ours, across time, through story.
Now, as my days straddle the lives of the aged and newborn, I am here listing babies to remind myself that life goes on even as life ends, that our faith is built on our ancestors, ancient and immediate, and that the young will one day find their footing on the paths we are laying today.
I type while my friend, also motherless, sits across from me, silent now after sharing that’s she just begun to talk to God again. Her loss is new.
I have always spoken loudly to God through my silence. That’s never been my struggle. My plight is seeing through the visible to the invisible, to look at life and death and embrace more than just the in between, to find with this map of words the way forward my heart already knows.
