My grandmother, Marie, passed away last Autumn. I’ve spoken at many funerals over the years, but hers was the hardest. Her battle was so long and hard, and not what anyone would have wanted. I’m not Catholic and I don’t believe in purgatory. I’ve seen enough of life to know that the fires of sanctification are all-consuming enough on this side of eternity. When it comes time to die, we will need to be carried gently and set down in the presence of every miracle, as a child of the house. We have been tempted and tried and tested in every possible way. Then it will be time to feel and see and know, to be made new in a way the earth has only whispered of. I believe these things were true for my grandmother, not because she was a good person, but because she knew she was not. She had faith, sometimes just a little bit, but I’ve heard it’s like leaven.
Here are a few things I wrote about her over the years…
I enter the doors of Walmart only for those I love who won’t accept this truth by any other means.
“Here’s my list,” and she handed me a little notebook page, covered back to front. “Now we’re not leaving until we get everything on it.”
I dug for a pen. “Here, Nanny! Shampoo. It’s on your list. Here they are. Which do you want?”
“I don’t need shampoo.”
“But it’s on the list.”
“Well I don’t need it.”
We got body powder (check), cat treats (check), baby dolls for the great-grand-babies (check), Special K (check), ice cream (check), cookies, frozen pizza and a can of refried beans (not listed).
“Butter! Here’s butter, Nanny. You need some.”
“No I don’t.”
“But it’s on the list… why don’t you get some just in case?”
“Sarah. You’re driving me crazy.”
“If I cannot bear to be like the father who did not soften the rigors of the far country… then I know nothing of Calvary love.”
Amy Carmichael
I have seen enough of death to know that sometimes things get easier when a person dies. It’s just the truth. But then there are some people, a certain type of man I think, who, even though he suffers long and hangs by a thread, as long as his heart beats, he holds the world in place. He is feared and respected as long as he breathes. My grandfather, emotional and silly as he was, was a man like that, and nothing, nothing got easier when he died. Four years later, we are still suffering from his absence. Just a few moments of him here with us again would part our troubled waters, but this cannot be.
Our favorite dog, in the last few years of his life, would have days when he was mostly normal except he couldn’t lift his head. We called it a head’s down day, and we were all a little sad on one of those.
When my grandfather left this old world, as he often teased he would, he left my grandmother to head’s down days. There are some people who just need someone else, plain and simple. Need is not the same as love, but I think to be happy to both need and be needed by someone makes up a lot of our love in the long run. She needed everything he was. She needed someone to decide what was right and who was right. She needed someone to hang up the phone. She needed someone to roll his eyes and shake his head. She needed someone to wink and sayRee baby, why don’t you come on over here. She would run from him most of the time, but he was also the one she would run to.
I just don’t know anything anymore, she said. And when I do know something, I know it’s not right. I tried to imagine how this might feel, and it was truly the worst feeling in the world. We would have done all we could to spare her from this. Even now, we imagine sometimes we still can. But as she is dying by living into her limits and frailty, so are we. We cannot fix this. The best we can do is stay with her, whether she knows we’re there or not.
The good thing about being raised a Christian is that the Scriptures easily come to mind. The bad thing is that you can suppress them as old news, a flippant answer, as so many cliches. It is hard to know if you should bring them out in suffering or not. And so I think the Lord sometimes must bring us to a point where it’s simply all we have. We reach back and pull them out. We smooth the pages and shine a light. We read now like a traveler reads his map.
So I found a notepad in her house and in big print, dividing the letters equally with the blue dotted line between the two solid ones, just like she used to do for me, I wrote the verse from Philippians 4: The Lord is at hand. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
She read it many times. The peace of God, she said.
She loses papers easily, but that verse has stayed around her little white recliner for weeks now. She had gone over the words with a pen. She has written beside them:
God is near to the brokenhearted.
It is not my place, nor in my power, thank goodness, to keep her from this truth, but I know I will try again and again, for her and for many others… And I will learn it myself in the trying, for we are not given two heavens, but one, and we are a long way yet from there.
It can be very hard when someone you love is losing their memory, not to lose yours too. It’s easy to only see who they are in the moment, and not who they are really, which includes who they have been and who they will be.
My Nanny is, has always been and will always be, one of my best friends.
In my earliest memories, I remember being sung to by my parents. I remember being able to go down the loft stairs without touching the ground. But mostly, I remember Nanny.
I remember going to sleep at my big country house and waking up in her little city one, waking up, beside her. I remember pulling her ears while she rocked and sang to me. She sang Hush Little Baby and All the Pretty Little Horses— that was my favorite: blacks and bays, dapples and grays. I remember a jewelry box. She was showing my sister the ballerina that spun on the surface of the lake inside, but I saw it too. I remember, later, her food. Oh the glorious food, heaps of it, all the day. I remember the coffee we would drink in bed. She showed me how to pour into my saucer to cool it down. I bet it spilt all over the sheets, but I don’t remember that. I remember riding in the back of her car, little and tan, like herself, and hearing her pray, “Lord, keep this precious cargo safe.” I remember the moment I realized, all goosebumped, that she was talking about me, about me to an invisible God.
It was Nanny, I think, who gave me the name Sarie. It was Nanny who dressed me up and brushed my hair, one hundred strokes every morning, even when I looked like Alf. It was Nanny who could tell me tales of Indian Territory, the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, of an Okie girl who left home, suddenly, for California, married a kind, but unknown soldier and lived an average, but remarkable existence of fidelity to everything she was called to.
It was Nanny and it continued to be Nanny for a very long time.
Her mind is fragile now. The fault line gave way when that soldier died. “I know people think I’m a hard person,” she said the other day. It’s not the forgetting that’s made her so, but the remembering that she has forgotten. It’s the fear of helplessness. But I remember who loved me when I was helpless. When I needed arms and songs and food and stories and time, all the time. I remember who remembered me.
I remember Nanny.
Good words.