a day late!

A Better Place

There are times in our lives when we have to finally let go of childhood. Things happen that remind us that we are, in fact, adults; that whatever we were holding onto, whatever bastion of our youth remained, eventually breaks down. It could be college graduation or getting your first job. It could be buying a house or paying your own insurance. Whatever it is, you know that things aren’t going to be the same.

Mine happened this week. My Nana, my great-grandmother, died yesterday. She was 98. This was the woman, an old lady as long as I knew her, that used to take my face in her wrinkly hands, lean me right down to her, and say, “You’re my angel.” She grew old enough to see not only her own daughter marry and have three daughters; she saw her grandchildren have kids of their own. She’d come to Oklahoma from Texas in a covered wagon, a decade before cars became common. She lived through the roaring 20’s, survived the Great Depression as a single mother, saw most of a century and the beginning of another. She was never anything more than a benevolent fixture in my family, even though my mother tells me stories of her biting wit, her humor. She was Nana, and the next time I see her she’ll have transformed into something that’s not her at all: an old, frail body at the front of the church, the spirit and energy that was my great-grandmother nowhere in sight.

It’s strange the way I’ve reacted to her death. I’ve always eschewed, ridiculed the idea of one’s spirit “going to a better place” when they die. Something about the idea heaven, of eternal life, is so tied up in Christianity, a religion I took myself out of years ago, that I can’t believe in it. But today I can’t help but feel like she’s in a better place, indeed. It was her body, not her mind, that failed her, and it couldn’t have been easy to deteriorate physicially while being fully cognizent. She’s in a better place, whether that place is heaven or just the end; eternal life or unending sleep.

In this way it’s been easy, knowing that her struggle with old age is over, to let go of her. What’s been harder is what her death means, the way that it’s been a harbinger of things to come in my own life. Death, anyone will tell you, is unavoidable. Up till now, though, I’ve lived under the delusion that my life could go on forever at is was, sailing, unchanged. But for the first time since I’ve been old enough to care, it has changed. Life isn’t permanent; people move, people grow apart; people die.

It’s hard for me to let go of this part of my childhood. I can’t help but feel like with my great-grandmother’s passing a bit of me passed, too. That child, my Nana’s angel, is gone; I’d never give up what I have as an adult to revisit childhood, but her death has reminded me, at the risk of sounding cliched, that I only get one chance on this earth. That life is linear, not circular; that I’ll never again have the chance to be a teenager or go to prom or graduate college. What’s done is done; the mistakes I’ve made can be apolgozied for but never taken back.

And so, I say thank you to my great-grandmother. Thank you for your years of kindness; thank you for raising my grandmother and helping her raise her family. Thank you for my memories of bacon drippings kept by the stove and for ham hocks and for making your way through life in Oklahoma, even when it wasn’t easy. And thank you for the grace with which you lived and died, and for reminding me, while I’m still here, to wake up, take a breath, and live my life while I have it.