2 posts tagged “death”

Today was the funeral.   The temperature was chilly and dropping this morning, with a brisk wind and thickly clouded skies.  It felt like late October for this part of the country.  My grandmother is cautious about getting out in cold weather since a bad winter a couple of years ago during which we nearly lost her to pneumonia and heart complications, so she decided not to attend the graveside services, although she did still want to go to Jane's funeral. 

As I sat beside my grandmother in the funeral home, I had to wonder if things could get much worse.  The pianist was...well, rusty might be a kind word.  The singers were...very...they knew most of the words.  And the speaker was...very well intentioned, I'm sure.    I sat in a pink, vinyl padded chair that made startling noises when one shifted one's weight and tried to hold very still.  I counted lonely looking carnations in a couple of scraggly funeral arrangements.  I considered the wallpaper border, the strategically placed boxes of Kleenex and the polyester suit jackets of the gentlemen in front of us.  I remembered passing out in this room when I was twelve, at my piano teacher's husband's funeral.  I remembered standing jam-packed here when I was fourteen with my friends at a crowded funeral for one of our close classmates whose brother had shot him, their step-mother and step-sister after school one day.  I remembered a double funeral here ten years ago for two of a good friend's brothers, killed in a car wreck when one fell asleep at the wheel late at night.  I remembered visitation in this room seven years ago, after my grandfather died; it was overflowing with flowers then, full of friends and family, photographs and shared memories.  That night, the night it should have been least bearable for me, given the closeness of our family, it was a good place to be.  I listened again to the halting piano playing, the somewhat wandering singing, the rather befuddling (or befuddled) speaker.  I let my gaze linger on the lavender roses in the lavishly lovely casket spray.  I considered the way the men in the polyester jackets put their arms around their wives or bowed their heads during the prayer, the way they slowly made their way down the aisle to pay their last respects, hats in hand.   

Good Lord, the last thing I want at my funeral is music like this or this kind of speaking!  But..the people.  If good people could say of me what I heard a young man behind me saying of Jane...I could maybe bear even this room. "The Bible says to man is alloted eighty years.  Jane had ninety-three, and she used that gift well."

To use our gift well, not in light of accomplishments or successes, but in light of people, of lives touched.  I cannot think of a better eulogy.

This morning I took my nearly 90 year-old grandmother on a trip to her doctor's.  From the waiting room windows I could see across the highway to a lovely golf course with a fountain and lots of trees and open swaths of grass, a beautiful view. Doing my best to ignore Family Feud on the waiting room television, I opened my journal and took out a fountain pen.

9:22 a.m.

The sun is shining this morning The trees throw light back from their leaves, leaves that are showing the beginning of the autumn change, some darkening, some paling, some shifting from the greens they've held so faithfully all summer.  The air is relatively still today.  The sunshine lies stretched across the golf course lawn like a langourous cat.  In the fountain, water glints and flashes as it ripples to the sides.  The air glows about us, a lazy, living thing.

I've always loved autumn, the quieting of the natural world, the softening of the crickets' and cicadas' intense songs, the hush of wind through drying grasses, the graceful silver of spiders' balloon threads streaming from every rising stem across the fields as the lowering western sun sets them afire.

3:10 p.m.

I've been at my grandmother's all afternoon, since we returned home.  A few minutes ago she got a call from a good friend's sister, telling her that Jane died this morning.  My grandmother had just been putting together a copy of the local paper, intending to take it to Jane this evening.

I'm not sure what "this morning" meant, whether Jane breathed from life to life in the sleepy darkness of predawn or in the bright sunshine of the mid-morning I wrote about only hours ago.  Either way, I like to think she stepped from one world to the next nimbly, her feet newly quickened and sure, a bright smile on her face as her Beloved took her hand to steady her crossing.

Autumn is a beautiful time of year.  The leaves, of course, are gorgeous.  It's the quality of light, though, that I love fiercely; there is something brighter, more immediate about it, as though it shines richly forth from another realm, one that draws closer to this world as the earth dutifully begins her descent into the winter darkness that preceeds a more brilliant light and life.  I'd never really thought of it all that way until today with Jane's passing and all this amazing, painfully glorious light.