Visiting Grandma’s Grave

Quietude

Grandma Carole could sit totally silent with you. She didn’t care about whether there was noise or not.

In those silences, she’d look at me and laugh or smile or squeeze my hand. I swear, in those small motions she said more than I ever have.

Birdwatching

There was a cardinal imprinted on Grandma’s gravestone that I never noticed before. I knelt down and traced it with my fingers. 

She loved watching the birds out in the Illinois wetlands where my grandparents retired. She had two binoculars and a radio that felt like it played distant music and she would sit and teach us to trace the outline of the birds. She knew their names and until you asked about them, you never realized just how many birds there were in the world.

Stubborn

In the back of my mind, I thought it’d be funny if we brought a pair of socks to the ceremony. Like a lot of old people, she could be intransigent over the oddest things. It took a lot of talking for us to get her to buy a new pair of socks because she hated shopping.

She was a very serious woman and didn’t like the idea of buying frivolous things and a frivolous place when pressing things were going on somewhere else. I still think that was a bit silly of her.

Coincidentally, my three year old niece didn’t wear socks that day either. She refused them like a cat or a dog refuses to do things when you move to a new home – too much change. Maybe after a point it feels like too much in the wider world changes. Or maybe as you get older, you come closer to being a child. Closer to that origin point.

In the doing

My uncle brought up that Carole was brave and had done a lot in her life. Doing, in the sense of things that you have to try to arrange and break the flow of your own living to accomplish.

She moved out of a rural Minnesota town after high school and during wartime. She married into a Jewish family and completely took the culture on when antisemitism was a thing a world power moored its morality on. She helped lead anti-election fraud efforts in Chicago. She switched career paths in her fifties to become a paralegal at a top law firm. She learned to cook Chinese food because she enjoyed it. She built and rebuilt gardens. She read to the blind.

She did a lot of big and small things but she had just as many moments where she chose to do nothing. She didn’t like to take us out as much our Grandpa did, or to talk with new people, or to travel, or to shop. It never felt like she enjoyed functions or events or the many louder and more unnecessary social obligations you run into as an adult.

All the doings she chose and didn’t choose, that gave her a radiant sense of self. It always felt to me like I knew who Carole was as a person on top of as a grandmother and as an adult I learned not to take that for granted. It’s hard to make it clear who you really are because that level of identity lies in the doing. Seeing her regularly in that sense, I felt like we really were friends as well as family.

Gone but not dead, dead but not gone

Grandma died a month shy of her 95th birthday but if I’m being honest, I felt that she left when she had her stroke years before that.

I never expressed that feeling much to others because it could darken things, but in my eyes she wasn’t that full person she once was. There was no perspective that I could take to think she was, no way to work myself into believing it. Even in the brief moments of clarity that came, she was just so gone.

I sometimes see a viral post about the beauty in sitting with the old and addled and letting them amble through old memories, finding things and losing things, picking up and leaving off in all different parts of the world of their life. That was how it was when Carole was only old. It wasn’t how it was after the stroke.

Grandma rarely remembered things, at least when I was around. She didn’t really remember me most days I visited. The corridors she walked through never existed. The things she picked up usually weren’t real.

It was hard to watch and visiting her hurt me deeply each time. Her life was in the quiet doing, all the things she pieced together, and all of that was gone. She occasionally got to have shreds of the past. Maybe she even had bits and pieces of other lives or worlds she lived in. 

But overall she was gone. Gone but not dead. 

There was nothing that anyone could say to me, in any part of my family, that was going to convince me from what I saw with my own eyes. So I buried that kind of talk and I did the visits until she died, getting lots of water breaks and taking small walks. I was both very up and very down when she died because by the end dying was what she wanted to do. She was open about that all the way through.

Growing up Buddhist, I talked with her about reincarnation once. I asked if she didn’t find it compelling to come back and live with us again. She told me emphatically that once was enough. By the time she was 90, she was watching the world deteriorate on the news and she was mostly out of belief in God (she told me so directly). That was her kind of honest dour.

All the same, I didn’t begrudge anybody else for wanting to keep her here and catch the brief moments of lucidity where they came. After all, you can’t really let a person like this go. At least not fully. 

These kinds of immense and important people that held the family tree in place aren’t replaceable. They’ve done so much that their actions linger past them. Their deeds keep speaking once they stop.

And you’re always there, listening to that ghost. You feel random pangs at the moments in the past that you can’t reach back and have anymore. You see the shadow casting out from the reaching you do to meet their image and the examples they set.

Overall, people like this never leave. Dead but not gone.