A Hard Day

This is a hard day. My grandmother died. It was a slow decline and not unexpected...but still. The finality of death.

I wrote her or sent pictures or sent a silly craft the littles had made every month of this last year of her life. She'd been moved to a home and, more even than cheering her up, I wanted the staff there to know that she had family who loved her and would be checking in on her. She didn't want to go into that home. It wasn't right. She seemed so sad when I visited her there. I'm sad that that tiny room was where she died.

She should've been in one of our homes and among family. I was holding my other grandmother in my arms when she died. My mom on one side and me on the other, making a three generation nest. I literally felt her final shuddering breath. I watched her spirit rise from her body and leave the room.

I touched my dad's cold arm in the emergency room bay after they finally quit trying to revive him from his drowning accident. They'd cleaned him up as best they could but still, there was one drop of blood on the sheet next to his hand. I still don't understand that bright red drop. How does a dead body bleed? And they said he was dead, had already been dead, long before he was even found, let alone brought into the hospital. But I'm glad they let us see him; let us see the awful utter stillness of death. We children needed to understand. And there's no hiding from death when it's your own parent who is gone.

Sometimes I feel like the ones in the Harry Potter books who can see the Thestrals after they've seen someone die. For the children who haven't experienced death the carriages appear to move invisibly because they cannot see the horses. For most of my life I've felt like one-who-sees-Thestrals. A sad specialness I did not want. Those light-hearted kids next to me passing notes in class while I experienced a moment of remembered grief, triggered for some tiny reason.

This grandmother was the last of that generation to die. With her death I have the strange feeling of moving up the ladder; as the oldest generation dies I move from the youngest generation to the middle generation with my children, nieces and nephews below me. Knowing how quickly time passes now that I'm older; knowing that I'm getting closer to being that oldest generation. What will my life, my loss mean, to the rest of my family?

P.S. I hate the phrase "passed away". Why do we say that? It doesn't even mean anything. Americans are afraid of death. We can't even have true funeral rites anymore but instead have to do these creepily fake-happy Celebrations of Life. I attended a funeral a few years ago for a man who'd died suddenly leaving a wife and three young kids. The choir took the hymn "It is Well with My Soul" and turned it into a horrible praise song. Inbetween each verse of the hymn they wrote a new chorus that was just two words: God wins. Wins??? Is this a game to you people? You've reduced a family's horrific loss to a cutesy jingle?? Was the six-year-old daughter supposed to dance in the aisle saying, "Horray, my dad is dead! I'm so happy now!" Did the praise band leader even look the family in the eye and consider what his creepy jingle would feel like to them? The average American Evangelical church is utterly destitute of meaning.