Experiencing Death VI: Alone with the Dead

This is the sixth installment in a monthly thread, where I am looking back at the early experiences I had with death and reflecting on how those moments shaped my views and fears of it. In order to change my relationship with the concept of death, I have to understand what shaped it to begin with. Our ideas and philosophies are meant to evolve and change, to grow as our own experiences do.

My Grandma Donna died on Mother’s Day of 2001. I was getting ready to leave for my hometown to see her when my dad called, even though he knew we were on our way. He wanted to make sure we were leaving soon. He didn’t think there was much time left. My Grandma took a sharp turn suddenly, after her battle with cancer. I had fooled myself into believing she would be all right. I was in denial. We all were. We were all sure that my Grandma, made of laughter and strength and no-bullshit, would survive. But death is seldom fair.

            In the car, I could feel a thread in the air, pulling at my chest, connected to that hospital room miles away. I was breathing into that thread, willing the hope to remain tangible. The moment I couldn’t feel it anymore was like a tethered kite string snapping. In the car I started to cry.

When I got home my dad was standing in the driveway, waiting for me, and I knew I was too late. My Grandma’s death was my first experience with telling family a loved one we both cared about was dead. It was my first experience going to the funeral home, of watching the people whose mundane day involves the practical ins and outs of death while we filled out the obituary. It was my first time picking out a casket and learning about the vault we also had to buy to seal the casket in; we chose oak for Donna.

All the while, I felt cold inside. One moment my Grandma was alive and the next she was gone. It didn’t make sense in my brain and my grief was muddier. Part of me understood that people die. She’d been sick for a long time. Cancer kills. And now she was gone and our lives carry on. Everyone dies some time. But… I wasn’t ready. I didn’t get to say goodbye. I could still remember the last time I hugged her. If I closed my eyes I could hear her laughter, her infectious, deep, giggling laughter. How can a thing so emotionally tangible be gone?

I was filled with a need to see her body. To touch the dead flesh and know, truly know in my heart, that she was gone. It seemed strange and irrational. I mean, she was gone. That was a fact. But it wasn’t real yet, and I could think of no other salve for my grief. So I went to the funeral home between viewings, when the room was closed. I told them I was family and that I didn’t get to say goodbye. They left me alone in the chilled room with her body, saying if there was anything they could do…

It took me minutes to approach the thing that looked like her but did not feel like her. A part of me was sure it was simply a poor wax figure of Donna. That wasn’t her. It couldn’t be. It felt like one of my senses had been cut off and I couldn’t translate what I was seeing into a proper context. Whatever spirit it was that infused her limbs while alive, in death it was absent, at rest elsewhere. Still, before me was the body I knew, the arms that had held me all my life. The body is the temple and deserves the respect we show our churches, whatever that means to us.

When I touched her, for the first time I understood the dimensions of the difference between the words skin and flesh. I touched her flesh. Skin is a thing alive and yet when I touched her it was nothing but timber and molecules that built a structure. There was nothing of her there for me. She was wearing a suit the likes of which I had never seen her in and makeup that would never have crossed her face. The body before me was a respectful attempt at the Grandma I knew, transcribed by a stranger. I let the intention of sincere respect present in the display hold weight in my heart.

I still ache for the goodness of the person she was, for the times I would see her eyes narrow and knew she could see something about the room with the wisdom her years gave her that I couldn’t see yet. I ache for the time lost to us we could have had with her. I don’t think that’s unusual and it won’t be the last time I hold that feeling. She was a cornerstone of my childhood and a firm foundation in my life. The loss of her won’t be forgotten, but I have learned that the ache will lessen over time, as it already has, until there is nothing left but the smiles prompted by remembering time we shared together.

For Donna, 2001

I

In the highlands where blue and smoky mountain peaks meet,

a great white owl shared space with me

along a streambed of wild thyme and mimosa.

A rush of wind with unblinking dandelion-colored eyes,

she appeared as clouds crept the silent streets at twilight.

I held my breath against the fragrant green surrounding me,

far removed from the crumbling factory town of my childhood,

a small house along the Erie Canal offering little to children,

waiting for day trips to the field of golden-yellow blossoms

across from my grandma’s house.

II

Can spirits visit

before

they die?

III

In the split-ranch with Arizona white walls

a braided macramé owl,

orange bead beak,

met us at the door,

perched on a stick of stripped wood,

guarding the home

where chicken pox found me

in her bathtub, heavy

with the scent of baking soda,

her hands spooning cool water over my skin.

It didn’t matter she was not blood,

the only of three grandmothers to laugh with us,

pass time with us.

She stole kisses, holding

squirming and giggling grandchildren

against soft summer skin.

IV

“you would not have wanted to see her

this way,” mom says, “sick and fading,” she says

to ease a wounded heart,

“i told her how much you loved her.”

but when

did i last

say those words?

we always think

there will be more

time.

V

Her skin.

Bleached in the parlor-

driftwood too long in the light,

remnant of a living thing-

Cold like plaster-

plastered owl bookends

crafted by thirteen year-old hands

stood guardian on the mantle,

white spirits.

White skin.

The powder she wore lingers

above the colorful lacquer mask

my grandmother

of southwest fire and sunshine

would never wear.

I want to scrape rouge from her cheeks,

scrub gloss from her lips,

I want to scream

at her defacement

so I can pretend she

is only waiting,

suppressing an impish giggle.

That she is only playing at death,

until I arrive.

VII

I am pulled back to the grass,

the thin air of that north Carolina peak where

the white owl stares, cold.

She blinks, gone in a great gust,

white ghost soaring above my face,

dissipating into ether while

 mountain clouds turn grey

and my heart softens in the magic.

Relevant Posts:

Experiencing Death: The Unborn Baby (published May 16, 2012)

Experiencing Death II: My Father’s Father (published June 13, 2012)

Experiencing Death III: Squirrel in the Road (published July 11, 2012)

Experiencing Death IV: The Body at Daggett Lake (published August 15, 2012)

Experiencing Death V: Suicide (published September 9, 2012)

The Eulogy I Wish I’d Given

Grandma Donna & Grandpa Dick

After he passed, I realized that I was not sure what my Grandfather’s spiritual notions were. He was raised Roman Catholic and we all attended Sunday mass with my Great-Grandmother when she came to visit for the summer. But I spent enough Sundays with him to know he didn’t attend any church regularly. So, when my Grandpa died, we requested the minister attached to the funeral home to reside over a simple service.

It was humorous. The poor retired minister was so excited to be behind a podium again that he threw every bible story he could into discussing death, including Jonah and the Whale. Yet he couldn’t keep my Grandpa’s name straight. The minister meant well, but he lost me when he started talking about how death was like the small white dead skin cells that fall out of your socks at night. I’m sure everyone behind me thought my silent laughter resembled tears. I hope my Grandpa would have been amused at the absurdity, too.

I was so overwhelmed with the loss, I didn’t even think about talking. It never crossed my mind that I might look back later and wish the moment had been more personal, more about my Grandpa. He was the reason we were all there. One of my cousins spoke for him but I wish it had been more than just another funeral. We were just trying to get through it though; a strange service held behind stranger walls.

A teen Dick in front of his parents store.

Richard James Riddle

December 23, 1931 – March 25, 2004

My Grandpa was everything to me. He was every Saturday lunch, every holiday meal. He used to come over at noon on the dot. He would tease me with, “What’s for lunch this week?” and then feign surprise when I answered with the same statement every week; bologna, cheese, mustard and potato chip (salt and vinegar was the best flavor to add to the combination).

He and my mom would sit in the kitchen together, the only time the smell of coffee permeated our house. He had his own stash in our cupboard, waiting for his weekly visit. I loved listening to them discuss the world, the way it worked. I loved the way they talked their way into hope. My Grandpa tried the best he could to see the bright end of things.

Me & Grandpa.

When I was a little girl, I remember lots of summer afternoons at their house, playing in the cool basement and watching Grandma and Grandpa work their garden in the back yard, Grandma in her terrycloth one-piece and Grandpa in his shorts and sunglasses. In my memory they are summer, fresh vegetables and warm afternoons filled with the fragrant smell of roses. They were the spirit of growing things.

We would often have family dinners together and I believed my Grandpa to be an accomplished baker. Grandma cooked dinner and Grandpa cooked dessert. After each meal he would pull out his latest creation and go on about how he had even put it in a special box that he found, to make it nice for us. I was a bit innocent as a child and didn’t notice what a handy coincidence it was that he happened to have a Sara Lee Coffee Cake box the same day he made us one.

I’m not sure the grown-ups had any idea I was buying it. But my Grandpa could do anything. One night, He pulled out a cantaloupe and started telling us that he had grown it all up in one day, just for us. It was the first memory I have of recognizing the impish twinkle in his eye when he was teasing or pulling my leg.

Only then did my rational mind inform him that you couldn’t grow a cantaloupe in one day. In the moment that the grown-ups realized I had just accepted his stories all along, there was some well-earned laughter at my expense. One of my favorite desserts is still a quarter of cantaloupe with a scoop of vanilla ice cream using it as a bowl. After dinner we’d play the card game Scat together. He would lend my siblings and me pennies from his jar and at the end of the night, we’d pay him back what we started with if we won and the rest was ours.

Early generational- I'm the baby.

My Great-Grandmother Elsie spent her summers with my family and we would take generational photos while she was with us; her, my Grandpa, my mom and us. He adored his mom, as did everyone who ever knew her. We spent days at the Riddle cottage in Olcott on Lake Ontario. I remember the laughter, so much laughter, love and togetherness. It’s what I thought the world would be like when I was a grown-up. I know it’s possible, to be surrounded by that joy and love. It’s the greatest gift my family gave me, that he gave me. I won’t settle for less than that. I look for the spirit of my Grandfather in the hearts of the people I meet. I like to think that he would approve of my friends, just as easily as he took to my mother’s friends.

Grandpa Dick also had a beautiful Cadillac. I loved riding in it with him. Sometimes when he was watching us, he’d take us to his favorite diner for breakfast. All of the waitresses knew him and chatted him up. He’d happily introduce us and we’d hear how often he’d talk about us. I knew my entire life that my Grandpa loved me, even when he wasn’t with me. It’s such a thing we take for granted sometimes, but now that he’s gone, it means everything.

When his cancer came back, I went home to spend some time with him. I asked him questions about his parents, pushing through the awkward moment of both of us knowing I was asking him because he was dying. Because he might not recover and then there would be no answers. I picked up his prescriptions and took him some groceries one night, after copying old family photos. That was the night I learned that we shared a favorite flavor of ice cream… Black Raspberry.

He was every Christmas morning, all of my life. The very last Christmas we had together, I was 27. My nieces were opening presents and the youngest said “Thank you, Great-Grandpa!” To which the middle child said, “Don’t call him that. It’s rude!” My Grandpa smiled and said, “Why? That’s what I am.” And that’s who he was.

Dick & Donna's wedding.

Richard James Riddle was born in 1931. He had a brother and a sister. His parents owned a small store. He was a young boy when World War II began. He spent some time in the military. He was married twice, had one daughter, and three step-children. His second wife, my Grandma Donna, was the love of his life. He outlived her by three years.

He was the father of my mother and father to my aunt and uncles. He was a father to my own and to all of their friends. I heard stories all my life of him dropping in on my mother’s friends and helping them out. He was a good friend to one of my favorite high school teachers, who lived a stone’s throw away from him after he moved.

I see the ripple of his time on this earth stretching out in the wake of his loss, still. And when I sit quietly in the woods, I can hear the sound of his voice in the wind that blows through the trees. What is remembered, lives. What is remembered never truly dies.

The Christmas Legacy of Donna and Dick

Christmas is a time of year where I feel the space between the importance of honoring our ancestors, and trying to walk the path of being a good ancestor, now, for our descendants. My childhood memories of the holidays are tied directly to my Grandpa and Grandma Riddle. They have both passed on within the last decade, and every year, when the holidays roll around, I miss them.

There are not enough words to express the loss I feel, that they are no longer in my waking life. I know that I am not alone in experiencing this. We have all lost loved ones and faced the difficult holidays after. My Grandpa Dick and Grandma Donna are entwined in the memories of my childhood Christmas traditions and their spirit colors the choices I have made in how I create holiday traditions in my adult life.

~*~

Christmas Eve was a night out to dinner, dressed up at a nice restaurant. When dinner was over, we would drive around, digesting our good meal and take in all the Christmas lights on our way to my Grandma Pat’s house, my mother’s mother. There, we would have food and drinks and sit in the smoky back-room exchanging gifts. Some years I would walk through the galley kitchen into the formal living room and up the steps to the room that used to be my mothers. There was an organ in that room and I learned to play “On the Street Where You Live” and “I Could Have Danced All Night” from the organ book. We’d totter sleepily home, the cold air startling away the smell of cocktails and cigarettes.

Invariably, my siblings and I would wake well before the allowed wake-mom-and-dad-up-time. My sister and I would creep into my brother’s room with our pillows and a blanket, whispering in a sleepy, excited, need-to-eat haze until eight o’clock. One year, because we’d been up so early the year before, my brother had bought and hid a pint of orange juice and a box of donuts in his desk. We watched The Three Stooges on his small black and white television, waiting until dawn. The one Rule we were not allowed to break was that we were not allowed to go downstairs.

When 8 am struck, we children would not be deterred from waking our sleeping parents. We were not afraid to open the east-facing shades or pull down the warm covers. Anything to wake them, to quicken the process of getting them up so that we could wait some more, while mom and dad woke up the downstairs. The three of us would scrunch ourselves together on the top stair while mom called Grandpa Dick.

My Grandma Donna was a pediatric nurse and worked Christmas morning so that the nurses with young kids could be home with their families. When I was a kid, she was Mrs. Santa Claus, doing a simple thing to give the kind of Christmas I experienced to the children of her co-workers. I saw the magic and the sacrifice of it, even as a child. She and my Grandpa would have their holiday when she got up for shift. He would wait for Mom to call and then he’d drive over to spend the morning with us. She’d put the coffee on and then we could come downstairs.

I know it was her favorite part, that look on our faces when we first saw the tree with all of the presents beneath it; so many presents that inspired my strong and whole-hearted belief in Santa Claus. In my life I have watched him transform from a story to a god to a saint to a man to a hero to a myth to a metaphor to an emotion to a state of being. That look on our faces when we were children- that utter joy and faith in something larger than what we knew… that is Christmas.

We opened our stockings first, while my Grandpa drove over, and the cinnamon buns baked in the oven. The Christmas Orange was my favorite part, sticking out of the top of the stocking like the new morning sun, greeting us earlier and earlier every day now. I wish I could say we ran to greet my Grandpa with hugs and kisses when he came, but really we were excited because Grandpa’s presence meant opening presents. A few times we were chastised for not letting him take his coat off, but he always laughed and said he understood, smiling down at us with a twinkle in his eye like Santa, he understood that he was 'just Grandpa' and Grandpa's couldn't compete with Santa. We took turns opening presents. Grandpa would leave when were done, to prepare things for family dinner at their house.

Dinner at Grandma and Grandpa’s was always festive and warm, with presents and dinner and games of scat at the kitchen table for pennies. There were always cookies and treats and the sound of laughter and knuckles knocking on the table to the woe of the other players. I would carry the smiles, the echo of laughter on the walls and the warmth of the kitchen home with me, against the bitter chill of winter.

~*~

Moving away from home years ago, in the absence of my family, I had to create my own Christmas. And first I had to revisit what the season meant to me. It’s about understanding and honoring family, in its many forms, and setting aside ego. Christmas isn’t about me, it’s about us humans, and the tapestry we weave as we journey through adulthood. It’s about all of the people walking the earth who mean something to me, walking and breathing and touching other people's lives. Goodwill to all beings is more than a holiday wish. For me, it's the only way to walk the earth. So for me, Christmas is the focusing of energy I feel year round. Which is something I hold fast to in the grown-up dance of scheduling around everyone’s family obligations. I am grateful for the moments of togetherness, and the new hugs and smiles and laughter that will sustain me through the months of night yet to come, peeling back a layer of darkness as the wheel turns forward.

In my own holiday, I’ve kept the cinnamon buns and the scent of coffee brewing, as well as the Christmas Orange. I set a cup out with a cinnamon bun for my Grandpa while we open gifts, in honor of the memories he gave me. Everything changes. Everyone who has come into our lives will go out of our lives, and we have more to learn from the waters of the earth and our bodies that we are open to hearing. It is in remembering the moments of togetherness and the lessons we learned from experiencing life through our elder loved ones' eyes that we are able to honor them at holiday time. These moments of togetherness are also a great opportunity to ask for stories about family members that you don’t know, and hear more tales of the lives of the ones you do.

I hold the moments of the past in my heart like a hearth flame. As I move about the crazy buy-this-now-if-you-want-someone-to-love-you battlefield of commerce, I have gratitude for the car that allows me to travel to those I love, and the home I rent that has heat. I try to share that gratitude with others in smiles and patience. In sharp contrast to the shopping days, Christmas morning is the one day each year that the country is mostly still and quiet, every family huddled around a vision of nature within their own homes. I always take a few quiet minutes to experience and enjoy the stillness of the world with my family, in my home. Blessings to you, in this time of celebration, and the Happiest Holidays from my heart to yours.

These are the collection of ornaments I received from my Grandparents over the years, kept carefull by my mother until I moved into my own home. They hold a place of honor on my tree every year.