End of an Era

March 2020

Two weeks ago, I had my last conversation with my Granny. She had been talking about having dinners in her memory care facility and talking with the men there. I asked her if she had a boyfriend. She replied "I don't remember...most likely!"

Sass until the end.

I didn't know that would be our last conversation. She was doing relatively well at the time. She remembered who I was, but wasn't sure at all who the little four year old with me was.

Me and my grandparents, 1979

Just a few days ago, it became clear that things were coming to a close. And in the midst of all that is going on in the world, we all knew that meant that she would be mostly alone when the time came. My mom, thankfully, lives close by and they lifted the Covid-19 visiting restrictions so she could move in with her for those final days.

Since there is no real place to be alone right now, I spent an hour in my car yesterday morning. I recorded my granny's favorite hymns (How Great Thou Art and Holy, Holy, Holy) on marco polo and my mom played them for her. What a miracle technology is! My mom is certain she heard me singing. Afterwards, I told her I loved her and that it was ok to say goodbye if she was ready.

But now.

Granny and her whole crew, late 80's

She's gone. 41 years of memories of an incredible woman are all that remain for me. Some of those memories are just captured in pictures but many others are clear to me...summers on the Cape with all the cousins and her digging for clams with our heels, the balcony view in her Florida condo. The hilarious interactions between her and her twin sister, Ann. She and my Gramps shouting back and forth when they both became hard of hearing. She was always up for a trip to the beach and she knew EVERYONE in her neighborhood. You could find her in the hot tub talking with anyone and everyone or on the golf course or taking classes just to enrich herself or at mass. Bringing my besties in high school down for spring break and then again my Hoohah friends down four short years late and Granny just fussing over all of us the whole time. My husband and I visited her the week after we got engaged and she insisted on taking us to the "club" for dinner and dancing. I will never forget she and my Gramps dancing to their song (Harbour Lights) and wishing us the best in our own upcoming nuptials.

She was a one-in-million kind of lady.

Their family: 60's

And now my family wrestles with how to say goodbye when we can't go travel. When there won't be a funeral anytime soon. When we have to grieve alone in our homes while the demands of everyday life continue around us.

I'm not sure where to go from here. I'm not sure exactly what grief looks like during a time like this.

I guess, just like real life right now, it's one day at a time.

Hank and Bea

I got the news of her passing just as I was getting my littles down to rest. They didn't really understand why I was crying and why I couldn't really read them books or do all the normal things. After I had them settled, I sat on my bed and looked through pictures and just remembered. Remembered a woman who always made me feel safe and loved. Who always made me laugh and stuffed me to the brim with food. Who insisted I take pre-frozen bottles of water from her freezer to the pool anytime I ever went. Who wasn't afraid to call out bullshit when she saw it but always did it in love. Who loved God and her family fiercely and faithfully.

Granny, words can't fully express how deeply you were loved and how much you will be missed. I can't wait for the day when all this current craziness passes and our family can give you the celebration you so truly deserve.

Rest well, good and faithful servant, beloved mother and grandmother. The world is changed forever.

Saying Goodbye

It's true what they say about life: it just keeps going even when you feel like your own world has stopped.

You get a phone call and this person, this loved one who has always been a part of your life, is gone. Suddenly. And in the background, there is one child needing to be fed and one walking in the door from school and another one napping upstairs. There's no time to stop. To think. To process.

So tears fall silently as you put sliced apples on a tray for the baby and you try to keep your nine-year-old from noticing because you don't have the words yet to tell him.

This will be his first loss.

I remember mine. I remember at just about his age, staring out the front window of our house as my parents drove away to my other grandpa's funeral. I don't remember who stayed with us. I just remember the sadness. Wishing I could go with them but being terrified of what being at a funeral would feel like. Wanting to know what happened, what it would mean, knowing somehow that my world had changed forever.

So, yesterday, when I picked up the phone again a few hours later to talk to my mama and couldn't keep the tremor out of my voice as she talked to me of her father and what we were going to do to mourn and celebrate him, he looked at me and said, "Mom, what's going on?"

My Gramps and I, circa 1979

And I told him.

"Gramps died today, honey."
"He did?"
"Yes. Do you understand what that means?"
"Yes."
"Are you ok?"

Silence. Big eyes.

My son is not a verbal processor. (I wonder where he gets that ;) I gave him a big hug, could tell he was trying not to cry in front of the neighbors and told him that if he needed to cry, that it was ok. That he should, that this is sad. He turned, went inside and curled up in his bed. I had two little nuggets at my feet splashing in a pool and had to let him go. Knowing he was mourning alone. Knowing I still hadn't had a chance myself to even grasp the truth.

Life doesn't always stop long enough for you to catch your breath in these moments. You still have to keep that toddler from doing a cannonball directly onto his baby brother in a 1 foot deep pool.  You still have smoothie smeared on your shirt front and an infant attempting to eat all the landscaping.

You still have to cook dinner.

My wedding, June 2003

And once you've done that, you have to go upstairs and cuddle your oldest child. The one sobbing in his bed. The one who has just figured out how loss FEELS. It's different from reading about it or seeing it happen in a Disney film. The next time we go to Florida to visit, Gramps won't be there. I can barely type that sentence let alone help him understand it.

November 2006, Josh 3 weeks old

I am fortunate that my son got to know his great-grandparents. That they were a part of his life and that my granny still is. They met him at 3 weeks old and saw him every year. They goofed off with him in the pool, he crawled around their lovely white condo messing things up as an infant, he made them laugh. They made him laugh and cherished him. He is old enough that he will remember them.

This isn't some nebulous, distant relative he has just lost.

For that I am so grateful.

It does make the pain stronger, though.

With his family

December 1950

And right now? The pain of a mother's heart watching her child's break even as her own is breaking is acute. Trying to find a way to process a world without my Gramps isn't going to be easy. He was easy to love. He made us all laugh. He was delightfully sarcastic far before I was old enough to even understand it. He said what he wanted to say. He served his country in Korea. He could watch golf for hours (How, oh Lord??!!). He worked hard and played hard. He loved my granny fiercely for almost 66 years. 66 years, friends.(Don't even get me started on how unhinged I become when I start to think about her saying goodbye to him next week.) He had three amazing kids who will miss him more than words can say. He, like all humans, wasn't perfect. But he loved us. And we loved him. The world is now a different place for my family.

His Grandkids

June 2010

In a few days, my son will watch me leave to
go to Florida to say goodbye. I imagine he'll feel a
lot like I did so long ago. Full of questions, unsure what to do with the sadness.

60th Wedding Anniversary

Aware, in a new way, that the world can be a sad, sad place. I can only hope as his mama to be able to mourn alongside him, share pictures and stories and help him figure out how he can say his own goodbyes even as I figure out mine. To find that intangible balance between mourning and celebration that is the only thing that can truly help us understand and keep going on in our changed world.

Gramps, rest in peace. You are loved and missed terribly already. Thank you for who you were to so many of us.

The Naming

It's been over four years since we lost our second child. That first year was full of pain and secrets and transitions. The second year was full of questions and anger and the first stirrings of healing.The third year was full of hope and waiting. This fourth year has seemed to roll all three years into one huge, emotionally chaotic experience. One constant, though, through these four years has been the namelessness of that little one. Calling he or she an "it" or a "baby" but never being able to refer to that child with a name. It's kept that baby distant from me. Nameless, far, removed. 

When I first began to share what had happened, that loss, people always asked me how far along I had been. And each time I was asked that I was reminded again that our culture, including myself, thought of the pain as less real, as that child as somehow less human, the earlier its death had occurred. So with each asking of that question and each increasingly timid response of mine, I felt that my pain should be somehow less than it was. This wasn't really a baby, it seemed. Just a positive pregnancy test. Just a blip on a screen. Nothing that should have had a hold on me.

But it did. SHE did.

I've written recently about the time I spent at a retreat center. During that time, God was very present. And though I hadn't spoken to Him about our miscarriage in a very long time, I felt the freedom to bring it up again. To bring the loss back into the light. To ask some hard questions. And all the while, I grew tired of saying "it." I began to wonder, for the first time, if it would be alright for me to name this child. This faceless little one that I never met. And the moment I asked the question, I already knew the answer. Why not? God already knew this little one, had already given her a name, knew her intimately. Why shouldn't I? And as I sat there, just listening, just being quiet, I knew two things. I knew she was a girl and I knew her name was Amara.

How do I know that? No idea. Does God regularly speak audibly to me? No. But there was just this absolute quiet and a sudden knowing. And I have never been more sure of anything in my life.

That night I got home and looked up the meaning of the name Amara. I've actually never met anyone with that name. I hadn't chosen it in the short time we had to plan for her birth. And as I looked it up, I was astounded to see that it means "eternal beauty." After all, this is the only kind of beauty that I will ever get to see of her. The beauty of getting to carry her little body for a short time and the beauty I will see in her when I one day pass on and finally meet her. Eternal. Not earthly. Not here and now. But someday. And forever.

Recently I stumbled onto an e-book titled "Naming the Child." In this book, the author, Jenny Shroedel, describes infant death as "the forbidden room." It's a place no one wants to go, an off-limits place full of painful memories, secrets, images. A place no one wants to engage or deal with its stirred-up questions.

But it's a place all too frequented by so many of us. Because we don't want to speak of it or burden others by the silent deaths, we keep them silenced. We don't name these little ones. And for some people, I recognize, the naming will only be too painful. It's not what they need. But for me? This has been a long-awaited step of healing. Naming this child, naming this daughter has once and for all helped me to unashamedly declare that she IS. She is not a positive pregnancy test, she was not just a blip on a screen, she should have and still does have a hold on me. She always should.

For three of these years I have worn a sapphire necklace just about every day, the birthstone of the month she should have been born. Sapphires, a symbol of truth, sincerity and faithfulness. And the day I named Amara, I stumbled upon the following scripture:

"For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, 
but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, 
and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you. 
O afflicted one, stormed tossed and not comforted, 
behold, I will set your stones in antimony and lay your foundations with sapphires."  Isaiah 54

I would never have asked for these four years. I would never have wanted to lose our daughter. I would never say those trite words that "this is for a reason," like some have said to me, but I do know one thing. Amara is a gift. And the years I've experienced after her death have been years that have changed me in different ways than maybe her birth would have. I'll never really know. I cannot. But since I cannot change the fact that I will never know her this side of heaven, I can continue to hope. I can be reminded that God's steadfast love has not departed from me during this time. I can, every time I glance down at my sapphire, be reminded of a precious baby girl who is a part of this family and is treasured.

Amara. Of Eternal Beauty. You have been named. You are no longer an "it."

You never were.