Sentiments

Happy Easter weekend.  I hope yours was special.  Mine was.  It was unexpected and good and not like other years, though the other years were good too. Instead of spending time in Iowa with family, we stayed home.  And my mom and grandma weren’t with us.  They were with my grandma’s twin brother.  He was 84, and he died today.  This has been both difficult and good all at once.

            I recently wrote about death on this blog.  What it does to me in a tidal wave, no matter what.  It was especially meaningful to think about this today, on Easter, when Christians celebrate who Jesus is, and what he has done.  Death is overcome.  There is no sting.  But today I talked with my dad about how grief and the shock of death, no matter what you expect in the end, is still hard to deal with.  And I just read this in 'The Screwtape Letters' yesterday…

            ‘The humans live in time, and experience reality successively.  To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change.’

            There we were, eating dinner, and the phone call came.  We heard all of the short details you hear when there is too much going on, but word has to get out.  We took turns shouting the news into Grandpa’s ear, and then, for the rest of the afternoon, we got updates. 

My grandma got to do this amazingly powerful thing where she sat through the night and held her twin brother’s hand as he struggled to breathe.  Excruciating, and in my own young years, hardly bearable if you think of it too much, and then at the same time, very peaceful and good.  They were born together, and she was with him when he left today.  She told me she felt grateful.  That it was a wonderful privilege.   I believe her, but I don’t understand. 

            In this moment, at dinner with the rest of the family, I am the one who cried.  Time and time again, as we hear about these things, I cry.  It’s not treated at all like it’s shameful, but it’s frustrating because I’m the only one who cries at first.  Others wait until later.  Once, a long time ago, a friend told me about her dad’s death, and I cried silently the whole time I was hearing about it.  She thanked me after the story because sometimes this is what she cannot do.  (‘And how frustrating is that?’ she said.)  Well.   That is, I suppose, the other side of things that I will never know. 

            I know why I do this.  I am not thinking of this one day, or this one week.  I’m thinking of a lifetime, all at once.  Of what Sherman’s life was for 84 years, and all of the millions of small moments that made this one life a very precious thing.  I feel it all at once, and it’s hard to compartmentalize. 

             I go right back to 1929 and think about the blizzard, raging outside the door, when my grandma and her brother were born.  Breech, at home, with people barely getting the right instructions for delivery from the doctor stuck in town before the power went out.  How different the world was, and all of the things he saw in 84 years, and how special he was to my grandma, and what he did for my life, and what it will be for the people who miss him to have to keep remembering that, for a time, he is gone.  (Or that we are still gone.)  Over dinner my grandpa talked about how he accepts death now, and it’s because he is old, and also because of the war.  But he still looked at me sentimentally when he saw all of the tears.  I asked him if Sherman was in his wedding. 

Yes, he was.  In 1953.  (A question like that, I see now, shows you the time of life I'M in.)   

A few weeks ago I read an article though about how to get yourself to stop crying, and I used those skills to keep it together.   My only consolation here is that I can cry, even quite a lot, and in about a minute look completely normal again.  No puffy eyes, no blotchy face.  (Relief!)

            On another note, we had a good weekend.  I’d even go so far as to say that our 90s childhood felt close at hand.  When my mom would work the 3-11 shift at the hospital, and my dad was in charge of keeping things together.  We have lots of good memories of certain fun things that we only did with Dad when Mom was working.   

             And that’s what this weekend was again, with one parent instead of two.  He made Easter dinner.  He gave us Easter baskets, though we weren’t expecting it.  Instead of my mom’s special touch, it was sentiment from Dad.  Who writes our names a certain way on the candy box, and who buys flowers for the table.  (My mom won’t…’I’m so practical, Jessica, and they’ll die soon anyway’…) and who makes us meals he used to make when he was single and doing things on his own.  It all came back. 

It made me really grateful to have had such a wonderful dad, who still wants to take care of us like that, even when his kids are adults.  And, no surprise, he’s the one who sits down to talk to me two hours after I’ve cried at lunch to help me talk about the shock of grief.  There is a timelessness to helping your kids that I keep seeing here.    This weekend, he made home feel special in this whole other way.  And…thank you, Dad.

            If I were to shorten all of this, I would say it in three sentences.  Jesus paid it all, and this is such a happy thing.   I know and love a great family.  And this was the life and peace of this weekend.