On loss
On the plane flying back to San Diego after my grandfather's funeral, I kept replaying the few times during his service when my grandmother broke down: her eyes clenched shut, her mouth caved in on itself, her hand flying up to cover her momentary absence of strength--a valiant effort to stay strong for her children that was so wrenchingly transparent. I never like flying, and in fact--much to my friends' amusement--spent several hours before the trip listening to 'flight noises' online to try to get over my fear of airplanes, but after the funeral, trapped inside the several tons of metal zooming forty-one thousand feet above the ground, death was all I could think about. I envisioned turbulence bringing the plane down (the online course I'd taken had said that turbulence has never once crashed a plane, but it didn't say that it definitively can't); I imagined multiple engine failures and what it might feel like to have to evacuate over water, and if I somehow survived a landing in the water (I recently read a book that talked about the fatal internal injuries sustained by falling a long distance into water; it's worse than hitting land, because your organs keep falling while your body does not, apparently) whether anyone would rescue me. I think I was afraid of was not so much dying, but of putting my family through this all over again.
Earlier this weekend, after the revelations of absence had begun to set in and I was sobbing rather hysterically at the kitchen table, my mother sat down next to me and said that she believes my grandfather is in heaven. He lived his life as a servant to God, but not a son--but even in that, my mother said, is a relationship, just as even a servant has a relationship to his master.
Later, I stayed home while my family went to church. It had been a rather losing battle with grief and I'd been around people the whole time, and I was tired of my startlingly endless reserves of politeness somehow surging up and crowding out any expressions of how I really felt. So I let grief hit and do with me what it would, and then in the midst of that God reminded me--or perhaps explicitly told me, for the first time--what it means to have hope, and what I can hope for from salvation: that my grandfather will finally meet the one to whom he devoted his life and of whom he lived in fear, that when he opens his eyes on the other side he will be overwhelmed with the knowledge that his servitude is no longer required and that now he can live with Christ, who will smile at my grandfather and say, "Well done," and will then lead him into a paradise my grandfather never once allowed himself to fathom, a place where there is no death, no Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or pneumonia or shitty hospital care or awkward hugs and too-bright smiles from granddaughters who don't know how to react to a man painstakingly becoming someone other, someone less, than himself, where all things are made new and where Christ is present and accesible and where it is for the first time possible to fully understand Christ's love and his glory and where we somehow fit into that.
And, too, that I will see my grandfather again, when both of us have been stripped of all that is fleshly and impure and when somehow, miraculously, we have both been made perfect. And this, I realize, is the hope upon which I base my faith.
Still, though, in the meantime it's hard. So much harder, in fact, than I ever would have anticipated. I think I thought that because for the past six years he's had Alzheimer's that I'd already done my grieving, and that we'd lost him somewhere along the way and when he died it would feel a natural progression, the final of many progressive stages of letting go. It wasn't, though; the way it ended up playing out instead was that we lost him twice.
Earlier this weekend, after the revelations of absence had begun to set in and I was sobbing rather hysterically at the kitchen table, my mother sat down next to me and said that she believes my grandfather is in heaven. He lived his life as a servant to God, but not a son--but even in that, my mother said, is a relationship, just as even a servant has a relationship to his master.
Later, I stayed home while my family went to church. It had been a rather losing battle with grief and I'd been around people the whole time, and I was tired of my startlingly endless reserves of politeness somehow surging up and crowding out any expressions of how I really felt. So I let grief hit and do with me what it would, and then in the midst of that God reminded me--or perhaps explicitly told me, for the first time--what it means to have hope, and what I can hope for from salvation: that my grandfather will finally meet the one to whom he devoted his life and of whom he lived in fear, that when he opens his eyes on the other side he will be overwhelmed with the knowledge that his servitude is no longer required and that now he can live with Christ, who will smile at my grandfather and say, "Well done," and will then lead him into a paradise my grandfather never once allowed himself to fathom, a place where there is no death, no Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or pneumonia or shitty hospital care or awkward hugs and too-bright smiles from granddaughters who don't know how to react to a man painstakingly becoming someone other, someone less, than himself, where all things are made new and where Christ is present and accesible and where it is for the first time possible to fully understand Christ's love and his glory and where we somehow fit into that.
And, too, that I will see my grandfather again, when both of us have been stripped of all that is fleshly and impure and when somehow, miraculously, we have both been made perfect. And this, I realize, is the hope upon which I base my faith.
Still, though, in the meantime it's hard. So much harder, in fact, than I ever would have anticipated. I think I thought that because for the past six years he's had Alzheimer's that I'd already done my grieving, and that we'd lost him somewhere along the way and when he died it would feel a natural progression, the final of many progressive stages of letting go. It wasn't, though; the way it ended up playing out instead was that we lost him twice.
posted by Kelly at
1:30 AM
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