I’ve recently found myself– quite accidentally!– un(der)employed and suddenly, for the first time in a while, with LOTS of free time on my hands. I thought I might spend my time reading or going to free museums during the days, and rest assured, I will do plenty of that, but I thought a good use of my time might be to build this blog into what I thought it might be when I started it.
Let’s see…a year ago today, I was probably in either Iowa or Chicago. I had just spent a week in Ames hanging out with one of my favorite people in the world (Alex!) and I was about to make an unexpected extended layover in Chicago. This is when I first found out that my beloved Granny had Cancer. I knew it was something serious, but I never figured what would happen next. Sometimes I see my life as “Before” and “After” huge events– I think everyone has the tendency to do this, but this one has particularly affected me. Before sometime in early August 2008, I had no idea that people close to me would Die. Obviously, I recognized that they would die, in a lowercase and abstract sense, but death was still a concept that was very foreign to me. Besides a couple of distant relatives and my uncle when I was too young to realize what was going on, the closest I had been to Death the proper noun was my dog Taylor, who died one morning in the summer after I turned 21. I had known Taylor since I was 10 and we moved to our new house on Quincy Street, and the two of us were quite the partners in crime. My life before my Granny died was quite a different thing– I was a lot more sheltered and fearful of showing my feelings. I was comfortable in some sense of the word, but I know there were always things holding me back. Now, though, I realize the importance of telling people how I feel the moment I feel it because before you know it, there may not be enough time.
I don’t know if I can properly convey the difficulty of knowing that the words you say to someone may be the last you can ever say to them, but I know it was hard for me. What can you possibly say? ”I love you” is a cliché and besides, everyone knows you love them and it’s nice to hear it, but what about something with a little more feeling behind it? I remember the last words that my Granny ever said, and that’s something special. The nurse at her bedside asked her if she knew who I was (lucidity was not taken for granted at this point) and she said “of course I do, that’s my baby.” God, I can’t tell you how that felt. I’m not a very good writer, so really, I can’t even begin to describe the emotion that welled up inside of me. (That’s another thing: Everyone always talks about these emotions that you can’t possibly know until you go through it. I never understood that until After.) These were my Granny’s last words– I was her baby. It’s just an understanding that we came to somewhere along the way, and I think that was the way we liked it.
I read a bunch of things about death when my family was going through this. I guess it was some sort of morbid curiosity, but I remember devouring Wikipedia articles about near death experiences and about what physically happens to someone when they die. That’s the part I am still afraid of. I wasn’t afraid to talk to my Granny in this state, but I was afraid of seeing her body or being all alone in her house as it happened. I was afraid I wouldn’t know what to do, true enough, but the biggest fear came from me not knowing how to see a woman who was so vibrant and full of life the entire time I had known her suddenly…After. So I did things any normal person would do: I remember going about my life in the house with her when I was there, and taking care of her cat and dog and watching Judge Mathis and listening to music, not quite in denial, but also not quite wanting to acknowledge the severity of the situation. I think this may have been a common theme in my family during this time. Suddenly our matriarch– the woman who had taken care of each and every one of us– needed to be taken care of. I think most of us half expected her to leap out of bed at a moment’s notice, feisty as ever, and get up and work in the yard. So we went about our business, trying to restore some sense of normalcy to our lives, which had been turned upside down in the most unimaginable way possible.
Granny loved cooking, and was especially famous for her 7Up pound cakes. These were creations that she had gotten so good at making that she would sometimes spend entire days in the kitchen churning them out, and she barely needed to measure the ingredients as she baked. This is especially special because baking is an exact science, known for being a particularly difficult art to some precisely because of the need to measure in order to attain the desired consistency. Like any good scientist, she sometimes carried out experiments, conducting research on subjects who most often turned out to be my mother and myself. Most of the time it turned out fine: Making green “slime” frosting for me because I loved Nickelodeon so much? THAT was cool. But I distinctly remember drawing the line at substituting grape soda for 7Up. Anyway, these cakes were always delicious, especially when she let me eat the batter or let me eat the freshly baked cake residue that had been left on the bundt pan after prematurely placing it on a plate to be frosted. The smell of baking was always something that made me feel like I was at home.
My mom decided to bake a cake on the last day I was in Chicago, a couple of hours before I was to return to New York. I think it gave both of us comfort to take part in this activity in the house that we had both known so well as we were growing up. I have to say, there was something poetic about it, something that writers a lot cornier than myself would belabor explicitly, but I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. But I remember my mom taking more pride in making that particular cake on that particular day than I had ever seen her investing in a project in my life. She still needed to measure the ingredients because her eyes had not yet seen as much as Granny’s had, and so weren’t yet adjusted to such fine details, but there was every bit the amount of love placed it in that I know Granny put into it.
That was the same day that the social worker came to Granny’s house and told me that I had very little time to say the things I needed to say. Something that adds to the difficulty of talking to someone in that state is not knowing if they hear you or not. Toward the end of your life, a lot of times people lose the ability to speak, but oftentimes they can hear you, even if they can’t show it. But still, I wondered if what I was saying was relevant, and another thing that I was overly concerned with was not speaking as if she was going to die. Obviously this was the elephant in the room. We ALL knew what was going on, but I thought about how I might feel if people were suddenly saying their farewells to me. I knew she would probably be concerned about my well-being and my family’s ability to cope with losing her. If there was anything she instilled in all of us, it was a sense of perseverance that frankly often manifests itself as stubbornness. Still, we were all human and none of us are immune to feeling profound senses of loss and as a health care professional, she probably knew that we would go through a lot of things after losing her. They told me that I was supposed to give her permission to leave us, to tell her that she could let go because we’d all be okay.
So I ended up thanking her for all the things I probably didn’t elaborate on when it mattered. Thank you for beating me at Scrabble, because now I win nearly every game of it that I play. Thank you for taking me to Chuck E. Cheese when I was a kid. Thanks for playing Redd Foxx records for me when my mom said I was too young to listen to it. Thank you for slipping me sips of scotch when my mom wasn’t looking. Thanks for that time I saw you and ACORN at City Hall speaking out against the Big Box resolution in Chicago. Thank you for letting me read medical books at your house and telling me scary stories and giving me candy and giving me manicures. But most of all, Granny, I think you should know that Mommy and I baked a cake today and it’s gonna be okay, because she’s teaching me how to make it and I’ll make it for my kids and they’ll make it for theirs. I am going to miss you a lot because I love you, but I want you to know that it’s going to be okay and I will always remember the things you taught me.
A few hours later, my life officially made the transition from Before to After. Before, the cakes my grandmother made were just a hobby, something in the background that made her happy and was delicious, but wasn’t as special as it is to me now. Now I try not to take things for granted. Even the little details in life are important these days. I plan to use the days that I have in New York to try to stay in touch with myself and let people know I care and live life to the fullest. I made a vow sometime After that I wouldn’t spend time with endeavors that made me unhappy and that I would try to seize the moment whenever I could. I’m still working on the latter, but I’m so grateful that I found meaning through such an uncertain time in my life. I’m hoping I can keep that lesson at heart for years to come.
