My Grandma died the other night, at age 92. I’m pretty sure she was 92. Maybe she was 93 but I don’t feel like checking, and what is another year added or subtracted when decidedly, it can be said, she was old.
I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this way when someone you knew died, but I get this urge to reach out and collect the stray memories. Death slips a person away and my thoughts eddy around the feeling of disruption. What place-keeper should I put to fill the new empty space?
I used to worry that snippets of memory didn’t count, especially on so large an occasion as death, but this short essay by Brian Doyle convinced me otherwise. It begins:
You will say to me that time passeth, that What Was is now only memory, that we cannot reclaim or resurrect that which is inarguably past, but I am going to quibble about this, and quiz and question you hard and close, for I don’t even have to shut my eyes and it is six in the morning, long ago and right now, far away and right here, and it is snowing heavily, and there is a silvery shiver to the world, and the house is silent except for how it sighs sometimes when it remembers the forest it used to be, and I am huddled deep under four blankets, and I know without even opening my eyes that everyone else in the house is asleep, for when you are a child you have the most extraordinary senses, and can tell the color of a bird by its song, and the day of the week by the thrum of the rain, and how amused or annoyed your dad is by the tilt of his hat. Why do we not sing these things as miracles?
And so, when I think of my Grandma, I’m transported to that summer day in Saskatoon when we are walking from Midtown Plaza and crossing 1st Ave to 21st Street. A car, its windows down, veered in front of us and Grandma called the driver a jerk for cutting us off. The driver’s response was to slow the car’s pace and follow us down the block while yelling insults at my Grandma. The whole thing was a fluster in my single-digit years, when my parents were the type of adults who discouraged me from saying “Geez” like my friends at school because it sounded too similar to “Jesus”. Thinking of Grandma, I think of food, of the way she added diced ham to scrambled eggs, or how she baked apple pies and white-wheat buns. These things were good and unpretentious.
I think I’m learning to be fine with the ambiguities of a person at their death. I think I can begin to agree with Elizabeth Bishop: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master;”…