The slow journey of grief is difficult to explain for all its nuances, but those who have experienced it know all the ways the heart cracks. I've been on this journey the last few years with two women who love me fiercely. There are fewer people these days who have loved me my whole life. Sometimes my phone will flash with an incoming call and I answer after a deep breath because I've been waiting for THAT call. I'm not ready to accept a world where these two women don't exist with their chats, their laughs, their knowledge, their listening ears, and all the things I desperately cling to-- for what is good and lovely in my life. In Rilke's Book of Hours he says "God gave us each our own death, the dying that proceeds from each of our lives: the way we loved, the meaning we made, our need."
My Grandma has Lewy Body dementia. If you know anything about this, you know it's progressive, brutal even, affecting both the body and the mind. I wrote about her and my Papa a couple of years ago, and their Legacy. In that post I wrote about her singing and ideas about life. She doesn't sing any more. Her voice isn't there talking about books, she's not asking me for stories about my kids, and she's not telling me stories about my childhood. She's not laughing with me over the stories I wrote in this blog, and she loved these stories. She had them printed out and kept in a binder next to her chair. She has loved me the longest, that Grandma of mine. Every visit ended with her on her porch waving, tears running down her face. Most times Papa was standing there with her when he wasn't busy doing all the farming things. Then the goodbyes were made from her living room chair, and then her bed. She doesn't know hello or goodbye anymore, and I leave every time with tears running down my own face. Papa is always there for the goodbye in the living room and sometimes he stands on the front porch, alone. I'll never be ready for any final goodbye.
It has been easier to accept the decline of my Grandma because I was still a phone call away from my Aunt Cindy. But cancer is a thief, stealing time and stealing love. I've been on the receiving end of that dreaded flash of an incoming call several times in recent years with news about her health, but each time that woman would come back to us, living past each terminal year, month, and day than she ever should have. Today's phone call felt like the slowing of a clock, winding down... something infinitely more final than ever before. My last phone call with her was just a couple of weeks ago. She was chipper, and had grand plans for continuing her creative life. We spoke about her family, and my family, catching up on the details. I was preparing for a trip to Mayo Clinic and she wanted to know all about that. "You're in my prayers, darling girl." How do I do without that and from the one who has prayed for me since she met me when I was three?
I have so few energies anymore for anything that's not kind, that's not lovely, peaceful, graceful, merciful, or gentle. I'm caught up in the slow grief-- intimately aware of how temporary life really is, and frequently thinking about what these two women mean to me and how that translates to how my life is lived. Rilke also said "... so many alive who don't seem to care. Casual, easy, they move in the world as though untouched. But you take pleasure in the faces of those who know they thirst. You cherish those who grip you for survival. You are not dead yet, it's not too late to open your depths by plunging into them and drink in the life that reveals itself quietly there." I don't want to do life without these two, but the inevitability is too close. I'm not prepared, but I feel the weight of responsibility to live up to what they saw in me, what they loved about me. Viktor Frankl wrote about love in Man's Search for Meaning, saying "Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize the potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true."
They loved the potential of me from my earliest days. They showed me all the ways they had lived, and encouraged me along my paths. I am me because of them. I can't visualize a life and its potentialities without them talking me through it. Their own foundations were sure even as they lived flawed lives. I'm just as aware of their struggles and regrets, as they have been of mine. "Well, my lands, it's just life," said Grandma over so many things that seemed so overwhelming. The acceptance that they were human and flawed is not something many people talk about. We immortalize the good and overlook the bad, but both women were very clear to me about their choices: the many wonderful ones and the ones they would "give their eye teeth" to go back in time to change. While they made some poor decisions that life couldn't undo, they do their best to live up to Proverbs 3:1-3: "... do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments; for length of days and years of live worth living and tranquility and prosperity-- the wholeness of life's blessings-- they will add to you. Do not let mercy and kindness and truth leave you, instead let the qualities define you; bind them securely around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart."
I'm forever loved by them and I can only hope to love the way they have loved.
