34. That Year, 1977, I Hate This Part

We walk into her room. It’s dark with the exception of some sunlight and a gentle spring breeze that streams thru an open window. I see her there in a sunbeam. My world collapses. That’s not my grandma I hugged just 6 months earlier …but it is. A skeleton with skin hanging on it lying on a bed of white sheets. Why didn’t anyone tell me? What would they have told me? Nothing would have prepared me for this. Nothing could. She doesn’t know me. I begin to shake. My mind is racing, trying to comprehend what is going on. I cant breath. I run to the car and sit there shaking, unable to cry. I am in total shock. Mom comes out and try’s to console me. Not long after the rest of the family joins us with the exception of Harley. When he emerges from the hospital he is crying. This is the the first time in my life I have ever seen him express this emotion. I don’t think his father or his brother, Uncle Wayne, prepared him for how quickly the cancer had progressed. None of us were prepared. We drive back home in silence. The only thing Harley says is “She didn’t even recognize me.”

Harley was the youngest of seven children. Grandma had him late in life. The baby of the family that grew up different than his siblings. He was very attached to his mother. He was always on his best behavior when she was around. He was happy. When he was born, WWII was ended and everyone wanted to leave that dread behind them. It was a different era and lifestyles were changing rapidly. He was not going to be content staying on that Kansas dirt farm. He got into a little trouble and his parents signed a waiver allowing him to join the Navy at 17. Harley would spend his life running, trying to create a life he imagined as child, a daydream that would allow him to escape the life he felt trapped in. I can appreciate that. I did the same for a very longtime. Sometimes dreams are the fine line between giving up and hanging in there. Sometimes, If it weren’t for dreams of a better way, we would have nothing at all. Sometimes, for some people, dreams never manifest. I believe Harley was always to focused on how the dream looked, not so much as to how it felt. The cart before the horse so to speak.

There is an eerie silence back home. We all know what is going to happen. There will be a phone call. We drive back for the funeral. Harley forced me go up to the casket. I did not want to but I am glad he made me. The mortician had made her look as I wanted to remember her, not the shell I had seen a few weeks earlier. All of her living children, grandchildren and great grandchildren are there. We bury her on the Kansas prairie beneath open skies. I am the youngest pallbearer. My adult cousins are all towering over me. I have never been to a graveside before. I miscalculate and my leg slips into the grave. Someone pulled me up. My cousin Richard. At the reception that followed I over hear my grandfather say, “Its such a shame that it took her passing to bring us all together like this”. That has stuck with me my entire life. Looking back, it appears that I have and continue to try and make reunions happen. Its part of my drive to never let what can be said left unsaid. There may not be a tomorrow or another chance. Speak your truth today and often especially when it comes to to expressing your love and affection for others. I had no idea that when I said goodbye to grandma at Christmas, it would be the final goodbye. We can rarely be sure that its not our last goodbye, so make it count each and every time.

David, Eddie and I go back a few weeks later to spend the rest of the summer with grandpa. It was so very sad to be there without grandma. The ladies of the town keep the house clean, our cloths clean and keep us fed. Grandpa sits in his chair, the saddest look upon his face. In the evening, after David, Eddie and I go to bed, we hear him playing his old records. I creep to the door and see him there, singing along as tears stream down his face. He has always been so reserved and stoic. It breaks my heart as my heart is broken as well and missing her. I do not want to leave at he end of summer. I just want to stay there surrounded by grandma’s stuff.

We return to Whitewater, school and our life. It is my freshman year. Grandpa wont be making the trip to see us this year for Thanksgiving. We decide to go there and spend it with him. Harley is on the road so will not be joining us. Harley has been on the road most of the time since Grandma passed. I suspect he was trying to drive as far away form the pain as he could but as I now understand, it is always there, a part of us. It changes over time but never goes away. We feel the loss as strongly as we felt the love.

I sit in the kitchen with mom as she prepares our feast. It is surreal as she moves about grandma’s kitchen. I feel her there, in this space that I had been in with her since I was an infant. The sense of loss is palatable. There has been a great deal of loss over the last year. But I still have mom and she means the world to me. I still have my brothers and sisters and as dysfunctional as it may sound, we still have dad. For better or worse, he was our dad. We plan to head back to Whitewater on Sunday afternoon. Sunday morning, early, the phone rings.

Its mom’s best friend, Crystal. Remember that floor furnace in that big old cold house that we all huddled over… It had exploded the night before and the house had burnt to the ground. Everything but the cloths on our backs was destroyed. The fire inspector says that had we been home, none would have survived. All we have left is each other.

That’s all we have ever had, that’s all we have now, that’s all that ever really mattered.