A few years back my grandfather died. I was lucky enough to have him in my life until I was 34 years old. This wasn't an easy feat for him, since he was 30 when my father was born, and my father 31 when I was born. I'll do the math for you -- he was 95 when he died. Though he and his kin have always come from very humble settings, they tend to be long-lived, something we can only attribute to a healthy sense of what really matters in life.
It was not until my grandfather died that I realized how much he mattered to me. He became completely unable to move around on his own about three weeks before he died. He asked my grandmother please not to take him to the hospital, because he knew he would never come home. Hospice came to the house the next day and cared for him until he died a short while thereafter. When he died, he was peaceful, and both my grandmother and my father were able to be with him. I found out from my husband who called me at work. He was hesitant to tell me over the phone, not sure what my reaction would be. But I knew it was coming, I knew why he was calling, and so I just asked him to tell me.
The tears didn't come. They didn't come for several days. The funeral was scheduled for several days after he died. My husband had to leave town and attend a dissertation defense, so he was regrettably unable to travel with me. Grace was on her way to camp the next week, and we felt it would be best for her to go ahead instead of traveling to the funeral. When both of them were gone, I drove to my office to pick up a few things before I left town. As I drove the short few miles there, a song came on the radio. "
100 years."
I put this song on a CD for my husband a couple years earlier, after we had been dating a year. I couldn't quite wrap my head around why it meant so much to me in my relationship to him. When he asked me, I told him it just seemed like it summed out how I felt about life and what I wanted my life to be. I wanted him to realize that life was short, even if you believe it's long, and that if you don't live for every day, you'll miss what matters. In a nutshell, I wanted him to realize that I wanted him to be part of my every day life, one of the big things that makes life worth living.
When the song came on the radio as I was driving to the university that summer day after my grandfather died, I broke down crying at a stoplight. I suddenly felt helpless. What was the point of it all? You live every day for what matters, you take careful steps to care for those around you, you live a long life, and in the end, it's over. I thought, as rich as my grandfather's life was, as lucky as I was to have him well into my adulthood, I just wanted him back. I wanted him back in my life. I didn't want to lose him. It all just seemed so futile.
The next summer, Grace was reading
Our Town as part of my required "Mother's School" that happens every June through August. We went through the play scene by scene, act by act, trying to understand the deeper message behind the words and actions on stage. There was a lot that went into it, but in the end we tried to understand what it was that Emily was learning about life in the third act. Why was it that the dead understood life so well and that the living couldn't see? What we came to was that every moment counts. All you leave behind after you die are the few ways you touched lives. The big things you think will matter and leave a mark, they don't really matter. That important contest you won, that moment that everything seemed like it should revolve around you, the accomplishment you thought defined your whole life...all this is lost. In a few short years, your body is dust and your accomplishments are not even history, they are forgotten entirely. All that remains is the way in which you changed other people's lives. Hopefully those people will go on to change other people's lives. And on and on the chain of humanity goes. In this way, this is the only way you live on, even though your identity becomes little more than a name in a family genealogy if you're lucky.
Her last assignment related to
Our Town was to listen to the song "100 Years" and write a short essay about how the theme of both were the same. As we listened to the song together, I started crying again.
My grandfather dropped out of school when he was in 8th grade. He worked on the farm from that point on. When he was about 20 or so, the Great Depression hit. He left the farm in Alabama to go to Florida for more work. He and some of his brothers heard that working in the sugar cane fields was money that could be made, and they could fill their stomachs. After the Depression, he got married, his only child, my dad, was born, and their family eventually moved to Miami where he sold life insurance. When I was young, I looked at my grandfather like all little kids do -- he was capable of anything. I had no concept that adults were limited. As I aged, I came to understand that though he was kind, there were some things he just didn't know. He could teach me a lot that I didn't know, but it was folk knowledge, not real book knowledge. I held that belief for a great number of years.
Through my ups and downs of life, he always encouraged me. I talked to him so often and spent so much time with him that I was almost able to imagine what he would say about a certain situation, even if sometimes what he would say would have been, 'well, I'm not sure.' When I was in what I considered to be my lowest points in life, he would simply respond to by saying to me, 'I know that Heather is going to do just fine.' Again, I was grateful for the encouragement and constant support, but I believed it was overly optimistic. A result of not really dealing with the constant pressures of a modern world.
In recent days, I have come to realize that my grandfather's comments were not simple nor the result of a limited life view. Rather, they were the result of decades and decades of living through hard times and joyous times, ups and downs, mistakes and hurrahs. In the end, what matters is every day, every moment, and that you are able to be healthy, happy, and give back to those around you. I feel so foolish for not seeing it earlier. If he were here for me to admit that to, he'd probably say something like, "Wisdom like that comes from knowing which termaters to eat and which ones to throw away." In other words, he would honestly and humbly say that his wisdom was nothing special.
And so in this way, I feel like he taught me an invaluable lot of information. Even though he is gone, he lives on in me and the way I choose to partake of the wisdom he showed me. It wasn't through lots of talking or his momentous life accomplishments which were paraded out in front of me so that I could be in awe of all my grandfather had done for the world that he taught me this. It was by my being with him in the simple moments. It was by my seeing how, even though I begged him to take me out fishing early one morning as a little kid and he took hours of effort to make sure everything was perfect, he didn't ever consider it a waste of time or get frustrated at all when I got a headache and an allergy attack within the first ten minutes on the lake and we had to row right back to the house. It was in his taking the time to telephone me each week when I was at college and write me letters, telling me how things were at home and how much he looked forward to seeing me again. It was by never judging, never criticizing, never opining, but in listening and accepting. In the end, I realize it made me a much more sensitive and kind individual, someone who can see good in people. Beyond that, I am able to reflect on my own actions and realize frustration doesn't solve things. Neither does being judgmental. Most of the times being harsh and quick to anger solves nothing.
So here's to a gentler kind of teaching and guiding young'uns through life's trials and tribulations.
