Two weeks ago I was exposed to mushrooms again, to what I thought was somewhat comic/somewhat disturbing effects. I think it was a bad omen. The next day my mom called to tell me my grandfather was in the hospital again and not doing well, and she was catching the train that evening to be up there. She urged me to look at flights, but I didn't think much of it, as he'd been in and out of the hospital so much over the past 9 months and I had such a hectic schedule ahead of me I couldn't imagine taking the time to go. Tuesday when I was out walking I noticed that the blind spot in my left eye, the one that I've had problems with off and on for the last 5 years, seemed to be enlarged again. I called the next day to see about an appointment with the neuro-opthamologist I've been seeing here, but there weren't any appointments available for several weeks, so I left a message on her voicemail instead, only to be cutoff mid-message because the box was full.
My mom had called me back and told me that grampa didn't have long, and if I wanted to see him, or be there for the funeral, I needed to get there, now. So I started searching for flights. My cousin took off from work early to meet up with her folks and make the long trek by car......my dad, brother and his wife couldn't leave until Thursday afternoon.......so I looked for anything that would get me to Pennsylvania. I finally found a flight, but it wasn't leaving until Friday around noon. So I spent Thursday cleaning, doing laundry, and packing. As I was washing dishes mid-afternoon I wished that I had been able to be there, or at least call the room and play my flute or sing to Grampa.......and a calm came over me.......a peace. I began to sing, the hymn he had wanted me to sing at my grandmother's funeral 13 years ago and couldn't (I played it instead)......It Is Well With My Soul.........
I sang through the first verse and the first line of the last......And Lord haste the day when the faith shall be sight........and the phone rang. It was my cousin calling to tell me he had just passed. He finally heard me sing that song for him. And I knew before I answered what she would tell me.
When I arrived Friday night I was exhausted. I'd been up early to finish packing, yet still somehow barely made it to the airport on time, and since I was selected for additional screening and full pat-down.......let's just say it was a good thing we were delayed leaving. Though it did seem bizarre to be waiting on the plane for close to an hour for the pilots to arrive from another flight. I barely had time to change planes in Detroit, and when I finally reached Pittsburgh, I turned my mp3 player on to keep myself awake until I met up with my cousin. The song changed as I stepped onto the escalator, and I shook my head at the extreme irony of the music during the tram ride to the main terminal. It was still playing when I reached the baggage claim, so I held the earbuds up to my cousin for her to listen to the strains of Guns n Roses' Knockin' on Heaven's Door........ I greeted my cousin and sister-in-law, both good friends from college, with hugs, grabbed my bags, then we sped into the night for a couple more hours of travel before we would be able to crash on air mattresses at my uncle's.
Five hours later I awoke in the living room, hearing my brother and his wife whispering about yanking me out of bed by the ankles, not a good idea as it brought back nightmare images of a half-remembered incident from my youth. Lovely thing to be dealing with on top of everything else over the weekend. I got up and dressed, then the younger generation piled into a car and zoomed off to McD's for breakfast and a wi-fi fix before the first of the two viewings scheduled for the day. That's when things got interesting.
My grandfather had 5 children of his own, though only 4 of them survived adulthood. His first wife died when my mother was a teenager, and he remarried a few years before I was born. The grandmother I grew up with had 4 children of her own, and my grandfather considered them his. One thing I loved about Grampa was that once you were a part of his family, you were always a part of it. That made for some interesting times over the years as various people divorced and remarried, but to him, they were all family. Apparently not so his most recent wife, who I no longer feel comfortable calling my grandmother. And unfortunately, not so the rest of my grandfather's family as well. Of his 4 natural children, two of them moved away and two of them stayed. The oldest, my Aunt, moved away to go to college, got married, and ended up a missionary in Kenya for 25 years. My mother followed her sister, living with her and her husband for awhile when she began college, then got married as well. She moved many times, and once we lived near her father, but we moved away again.....to NY, and now she's back in Arkansas. Of the two who stayed, my aunt passed away several years ago and noone really wants to have anything to do with her husband or kids, for very legitimate reasons. My uncle, the sole living son, has grown up to resemble his father so much that at times it was painful to be near him while I was there. He led a somewhat dissolute life in his younger years, and it wasn't until his third wife that he started to get things together. He has several children, all still in the area, and the rifts between them are many, convoluted, and sad.
The situation between my so-called grandmother's family and ours is not much better. My grandfather remarried 12 years ago at the age of 79, one year after the death of his second wife. She kept him alive longer than he would have lasted on his own. I know that, and for that I'm grateful. However........ It's been obvious that her children and grandchildren were always more important than his. She insisted that he move into her house in town, giving up living in the farmhouse he'd been born in, that had been built by hand by his father (or grandfather, I don't remember which). All of the furniture from the farm had been sold to finance their extensive travel, half of the acreage he'd had left (he'd sold off 60 acres) he gave to her and she sold to her children for a pittance so they wouldn't pay the gift taxes on it. 3 years ago when my brother got married and my grandfather offered to him that they could move up to PA and live in the farmhouse so he could go to school up there and his wife could teach nearby, my brother didn't answer quickly enough. A week later she called and informed him that the house wasn't available after all because her grandson and his wife were going to be living there "temporarily" while they built their house. We had to go to the farmhouse over the weekend and get boxes out of the attic (whatever his family didn't want of his books, clothes, pictures, etc, by the time we left, she was going to get rid of), and it made me cry.
My step-"cousins" are still living in the house, and it's a disgrace. There was garbage all over the yard, the barn is falling down, the weeds were several feet tall, and the house itself hadn't been kept up either. Not to mention the horrible remodeling that had been done. Honestly, if you're only living somewhere until your own house is built, why would you do extensive remodeling? And not do any of the things that could have been done to keep the place structurally sound?!?! That was even before going to the funeral parlor for the viewing.........
The family dynamics were interesting. I had seen my parents, brother and sister-in-law, cousin Beth and her parents, and "grandmother" a year ago. Most everyone else in the family it had been 10 years since I'd seen, and many of them much longer than that. There were several family members who wouldn't be in the same room with each other, or who wouldn't talk to each other, or who would hug and offer comfort, only to turn vicious as soon as a back was turned. There were some who wouldn't go into the main room to look at Grampa, and a few who couldn't bring themselves to even stay in the building at all. I went forward, talked to him, held his hand, and was glad that I hadn't seen him in the hospital looking so different and in such pain. Then bro, s-i-l, cousin B, and another cousin, the one who lived with us for several years when we were growing up, we all escaped..........finked out early and went to the coffee shop a few blocks down to get something to drink. We met up with the rest of the family at the church after awhile for dinner, and I got to practice the song my mom and gmom had requested. I wasn't looking forward to it. It's a popular song, or has been, so people are familiar with it, and it's not an easy song to sing well in the best of times, let alone when you're emotional. I Can Only Imagine Then back for round 2 of viewing. It was pretty much like the first time through, only I stayed the whole time, and as time was drawing to a close, I took a reluctant cousin forward to say goodbye. It was hard for her, and harder for others, as she can be very melodramatic, but she needed the closure of seeing him......and at least he looked good. After she had retreated to the bathroom to compose herself before seeing her daughter (she'd been taken outside so she wouldn't see her mom so out of whack), I went back up, kissed Grampa's forehead, and said Goodbye for now........
Sunday morning I once again hit up McD's for my food and wi-fi, then went to church with my parents. There was a chorus we sang with a line about a Father's heart that made me lose it, because I started imagining what it would be like if it was my dad's funeral we were having that day, on Father's Day of all days. After service we went downstairs and I ate a hurried lunch before running through my song a couple times and changing clothes. I had brought an all black outfit, and wished, after seeing everyone else, that I had worn at least a little color. When it came time for my song, I was shaking inside, but felt calm enough, until half-way thorough when I noticed a couple people in the back making faces and laughing. I missed a couple of words, a horrible thing to me, but I finished..........then I left the sanctuary and ran to the bathroom to have a good long cry.......I felt like I'd let Grampa down.
We spent most of the rest of the day going through books and pictures from the farmhouse attic and boxes from the basement of the house they were living in, and that night several of us had dinner at the pizza place I had gone to all the time when we lived there (until I was 10). It had been years, but it was so good, and so much fun to talk and reconnect. Monday morning My dad, brother and sister-in-law left, taking my cousin with them. I spent the day with my mom and gmom, going through boxes, reading, and relaxing, even getting a bit of time alone with my mom for a drive through the town we used to live in, complete with pictures of our old homes and ice cream cones by the lake.
Tuesday morning was the internment. Grampa was cremated, but by law in PA, the ashes have to be buried.........but it was raining. We had a short service under umbrellas by the little building at the edge of the cemetary, less than a double handful present. My uncle, the retired missionary, spoke, and I pulled out my flute for the first time since I moved to WA, and probably only the second or third since I moved away from Texas a year ago. I played It Is Well With My Soul...........the same hymn I sang for him last week, the same hymn I played at the funeral of the grandmother I grew up with. It seemed appropriate. Maybe I'll start playing again..........I think he'd like that.
