To Grieve

  The first time it happened I should have been the most prepared.  But I wasn’t.  We’d known for almost a year that this day might come and yet the numbness of the moment was overwhelming. 
  I was 10 when I was told my sister was sick.  She was new and tiny.  Still sparkling of the perfection all babies are born with.  But then her color yellowed and her abdomen swelled and we were told a transplant was needed immediately.  The months followed with surgeries and machines, but no donor. 
  The phone rang the night before school started the next fall.  At that moment it was as if everything around me disappeared and I sat on the cold hardwood floor under the harsh glare of a spotlight.  I was only eleven.
  I know we went to school the next morning and I remember small moments from the funeral, but what I remember most was the noise.  The constant hum in my head as I tried to smile at the comfort people attempted to give.
  After nearly ten times in five years I got used to the humming sound.
 

  The second time I was more prepared, although it still caught everyone by surprise.  It was cold.  It was always cold, or maybe it was just me that felt cold. 
  It was February at my Grandparents’ house.  My Dad’s mom and step-dad.  Only now it was just Grandma. 
  They had both come to visit us in Spokane a few weeks earlier.  Kind of a “we were in town for business and thought we’d drop by” type of thing.  Even at eleven I knew that wasn’t the truth.  They didn’t do business away from home and they kept talking quietly to Mom in the corner.  I pretended everything was fine, that I didn’t know a thing. 
  That was my specialty.  Listening quietly and putting the pieces together later.  It was years before I ever learned the whole story.  Grandpa Jim’s memory was going and they wanted us to see him before it got worse.  No one knew he’d have a heart attack less than a month later.
  That’s why we’d come to Richland.  To sit in a snow-covered cemetery and watch Grandpa’s flag draped casket lowered into the ground.  He’d been an entertainer.  One of many in the family.  He’d told grand stories about playing his guitar with famous people all over the country.  I have a clear picture of him in my head smiling.  He was always smiling.  During their last visit, grandpa gave us toy boats that we played with in the bathtub of their hotel room.  I still have mine.


  Eighteen months later I was enjoying my 13th birthday when it happened again.  My best friend had spent the night and we’d slept outside in the travel trailer.  We’d slept in late enough that by the time we came into the house it was very apparent something was wrong. 
  Mom was pacing the living room and my two sisters were sitting stiffly on the sofa.  Mom tried to talk but couldn’t stop crying.  Finally she blurted that my friend’s mom was on her way to pick her up because Grandpa had died.  I knew instantly that she meant her Grandpa Barton, her mom’s dad.  I’m not sure how I knew.  Between my parents and grandparents all being divorced and remarried I had several to choose from.  Of course that’s also why it was possible to loose so many in such a few short years. 
  That afternoon we left for Yakima where most of Mom’s family, including her grandparents, lived.  We stayed in their house, which now seemed even spookier knowing that someone had just died there.  It was a big house considering only about a third of it was the original structure.  Grandpa had been a carpenter between jobs for the government and boxcar hopping with his banjo, and before he’d injured his back.  He’d been sick for as long as I could remember. We usually only saw him in the evening when he’d shuffle out of his room, into the kitchen to make his “mush” and to the living room to watch “Wheel of Fortune.”  I can clearly remember one particular night when this pattern was followed as usual only it was Sunday and his show wasn’t on. 
  “Lenore,” Grandpa hoarsely called. Her name was Eva.  “What’d ya do to my t.v?” 
  “Bill,” she answered.  His name was James.  “Your show ain’t on today, it’s the Sabbath.  So eat your mush and go back to bed.”  That’s what he did.
  I sang with Mom at the funeral and my aunt read a poem I’d written about Grandpa.  Then the three of us watched as Grandpa’s spirit kissed Grandma on the cheek and walked down the aisle to the back of the church.
  I heard later that my Dad’s grandfather had died the same week but we lived to far away to go to the funeral.


  The following summer I moved to my Dad’s house.  It was quiet for the first year and a half and then, when I was fifteen, death started making up for lost time. 
  January of my sophomore year of high school I was in Dad’s den playing computer games when the phone rang. My best friend asked if I’d been watching the news.     
  The Gulf war had begun.  Before I could even speak Dad’s private line rang.  It was Mom. 
  I hung up with my friend and took the second phone from Dad.  Mom said that I needed to come back to her place for the weekend.  I almost laughed.  Never mind the fact that she lived at the top of a very snow covered mountain, she’d obviously not heard about the weather we’d been having. 
  We’d had a horrible storm come through that dumped several feet of rain, snow, and ice, followed by 80 mph winds that knocked down most fences, sheds, and trees in the county.  The largest tree in the back yard had barely missed the side of the house. 
  Then Mom said that my step-dad’s mom had died over night.  I told Dad and he said he’d try to get me there. 
  Later that night the phone rang again.  It was someone from my step-mom’s family saying her mom probably wouldn’t make it through the weekend.  She was needed at home in Montana.  She made arrangements to travel the sixteen-hour drive with her brother and sister-in-law and they were able to drop me off on the way.
  I honestly don’t remember this funeral at all.  What I do remember is the party afterwards.  It was in what had previously been our home but was now my aunt’s.  Everyone seemed so busy.  Busy making and serving food, chasing kids, and arguing over whom got what part of Grandma Haley’s belongings.  Noise.  That’s what I remember most.  Which was odd since Grandma was one of the quietest people I ever knew.


  Noise is also the main thing I remember about the next funeral, which was only two months later.  It was early spring.  This time it was my Mom’s Grandma Barton. 
  She had never had surgery or spent the night at the hospital before; she’d even given birth to all four of her children at home.  But she’d been having some problems and the doctors said the only way to know for sure was to open her up.  She was scared.  Grandma told everyone she wasn’t coming home and she didn’t.  A few hours after surgery, which found nothing was wrong, she went into cardiac arrest and passed away.
  It seemed the entire family stayed at grandma and grandpa’s house those few days.  There was plenty of room, yet still it didn’t seem right.  It was as if they’d gone out of town and we’d borrowed the house without permission. I don’t think all the cuckoo clocks comforted me any either.  Constantly going off at different intervals seemingly timed to the exact moment you passed them. 
  The funeral was nice.  I got to sing again, yet for the first time I couldn’t look inside the casket.  I’d heard too many people say how different she looked, and I wanted to remember my Grandma.  Weeding flowers, canning fruit, making crocheted animals and beaded Christmas ornaments for us.  Not lying still.  That wasn’t my Grandma. 
  Afterwards we went to the cemetery and then back to the house.  That was the first, and only, time I rode in a limo.
  My sisters and I didn’t have much to do while the adults argued over the wonderful things that filled the home.  We spent most of our time in the family room.  It had been a porch at one time until Grandpa had enclosed it.  I guess he hadn’t matched some of the boards just right because the room was always drafty.  There was a wood stove in the corner but I don’t remember a fire ever being lit. 
  This was Grandma’s play room.  It held her small organ and most of her knitting things.  Once, when we were little, we tried to count all the toys in the room that she had made.  We got confused after thirty. 
  Each of the great-grandchildren were allowed to select 2 small items from the house to take home with us.  I picked a stuffed owl and a puzzle that Grandpa had put together.  The walls were covered in puzzles that Grandpa had mounted to card board.  The one I chose was of an old man and a little boy fishing, something I'd heard Grandpa used to like to do.
  I heard later that another of my father’s grandparents passed that weekend also.  Once again, they had come in pairs.


  That summer I was sitting in the hallway at school.  I was most of the way through my summer course in Driver’s Ed and, thanks to city transit, I was one of the first people in the building.  The extra 20 minutes before class began was normally spent talking with friends as we waited for class to start.  Today I was near hysterics.
  I knew with out a doubt that something was wrong.  I didn’t know what or whom it involved, but I knew that something was very wrong.  My only thought was of getting home.  I rushed through my lessons, thankful that I wouldn’t have to concentrate on driving today.  And, like every other day, I was the first one finished with my written homework and thus excused to go home. 
  Another nervous wait took place.  Waiting for the bus to arrive, waiting to get home.  Once there I immediately recognized the looks on my family’s faces.  Someone else had died.  It was my mom’s father, Grandpa Stockton. 
  We had visited him a few months earlier at his home near the coast.  He was a cowboy.  Not in the spurs and shotguns kind of way, but in the animal loving, lives in a log cabin built by his own hands kind of way.
  I wasn’t able to go to the funeral and I really wanted to.  But it had been made clear that if anyone missed a day of Driver’s Ed they would have to retake the course.  Somehow getting my license didn’t seem as important anymore.

  A few months after my 18th birthday my Great-Grandma Jones, my father’s grandmother, passed away.  She had been ill for several years and no one was surprised by her passing.  She was a petite woman with a stubborn side that was shared by many of her offspring. 
  Again I was unable to attend the funeral, this time due to my work schedule.  Instead I took the opportunity to throw my first and only party with my parents away.  The disciplinarian and school teacher in her I’m sure would have been horrified.  I think Grandpa, a teacher also, would have laughed.  It was this weekend, actually, that my future husband and I began dating.
  Grandpa had passed when I was only five.  I don’t recall anything about his death or funeral.  But I do remember visits with him, his laughter, and I have a handful of pictures.  I realize now that it was soon after his death that I began seeing an old man in our basement.  After living in numerous apartments I had always assumed he was a tenant. 
  The year I turned 5 there were a lot of confusing events in my life.  Among other things, my mom remarried and we moved into a home belonging to my step-father’s family.  Frequently I was asked to go to the basement to get cans of vegetables or other items from boxes of storage.  Every time I went down the stairs an old man met me at the bottom and asked how he could help me.  I would tell him what I was looking for and he would find it, bring it to me, and place it in my hand. 
  This continued for the entire year and a half we lived in this home.  I actually remember being frightened of the basement in the home we moved to next because he wasn’t there.
  Recently I asked my mother about the old man in the basement.  She was stunned.  There had been no one living in our basement.  I believe he was there to watch over me when I needed an extra guardian angel.


  Oddly death took a break.  A break that lasted nearly 10 years.  He reminded me once in a while that he was still there, such as hinting that there was a very real possibility I could have lost my second child.  But he stayed in the shadows and lulled us into a reassuring peacefulness.
  By now I was married and had three children.  We had just moved to California and found that we had distant family nearby.  I was very excited about making connections with these lost family members until I got another phone call. 
  Someone else had passed.  My father’s father.  Someone I never even truly had a name for.  Someone I’d never met and who, in the two conversations we’d had, made it clear he didn’t plan to meet me. 
  Things hadn’t worked out between him and grandma.  And rumor has it that they didn’t work out with several other wives after her. 
  I spoke to him on the phone once when I was about 12.  He’d called my dad’s house to talk about his latest wife leaving.  After several tries at guessing which granddaughter I was he acknowledged that he didn’t remember me and could he please talk to someone else.  I didn’t blame him for not remembering me.  How could you remember someone you’d never seen or spoken to?
  After I had my first child I decided to connect some family ties and try to find him.  It was simple enough.  Typing his name into my computer I was quickly rewarded with a phone number and address.  Calling the phone number I was instantly sorry I had tried. 
  He sounded paranoid.  Surprised and somewhat frantic that I had been able to track his whereabouts so easily.  I did my best to remain calm and quietly fill him in on the lives of his grandchildren all the while listening as he repeatedly asked how I’d found him.  He didn’t sound happy to talk to me.  He sounded worried that I wanted something or was helping someone else who did.
  A few years later he was able to reconnect with my dad and meet my younger siblings.  I’m glad they had this chance.  This opportunity to make peace with the past.  I wish that I'd had too.
  When I was told that he had died I didn’t react the same as I had all those other times.  I didn’t have memories to cling to, stories to share with my children. 
  I couldn’t grieve. How do you grieve for a man you don’t know?  I found all these other feelings bubbling to the surface.  Sorrow that I had lost the chance to know him; anger that he had denied me that chance, denied knowledge of my existence.
  I had carried the man’s name my entire life and yet he didn’t know mine.  How do you grieve for that? 

  It took a few years but I finally found the answer.  You can’t grieve until you can forgive. 
  The others were easy because I had shared in their lives and they had shared in mine.  When death came I knew that they had finished their purpose in this life.  There was nothing left undone or unsaid. 
  That wasn’t the case with grandpa.  There was so much that I felt I had missed, that had been stolen from me. 
  I’ve realized since that maybe that was the plan.  Maybe how my life needed to proceed to bring me to where I am. 
  And I forgive him.  I forgive him for being an imperfect man in an imperfect world. 
  A world with a perfect plan that allows me to meet him in the next life.  Where he can meet the cowboy, the guitarist, the teacher and the banjo playing carpenter that I also called grandpa.