Common Good Cafe

Can we talk about death? Doing so requires a bit of storytelling, because it’s never an important issue until it moves from abstract into the particular, and death takes something of our own. Someone of our own. I was pretty lucky; death let me in pretty easy. One year ago I lost my 2 remaining grandparents. It was sorrowful but also sweet. I wrote this after coming home from the second funeral. In light of what has happened in the last year, it seemed strangely appropriate to share the memories I had hoped to catch for myself and my family.

These are personal memories, that may not mean much to those who didn’t know Fred and ElWanda, Poppa and Nonnie. But I found that the process of saying goodbye to them had a lot to do with telling and hearing these stories, saying goodbye in music and meals, and most importantly in the company of those I loved who had also loved them. Hearing their lives, saying goodbye to their lives, complete, made me understand them in me better, and reflected in the faces around me.

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12/31/07
Will Rogers International Airport on a sunny day — miles of crystal blue sky out the big glass window. Saying goodbye to Oklahoma is always poignant, more so this time.

I will now forever remember the death of Poppa connected to the death of most of the fine old trees in Norman, on the streets where I lived, around the university especially where the trees were biggest. It’s not like the plains have enough trees to spare — even in a relatively old town like Norman that has well over a century under its belt, the people and trucks still seem to outnumber the trees. Branches broken off by the ice storm lie stacked neatly along every curb, the grass turned to straw; and Sunday heard the buzz of chainsaws as cleanup continued into evening. Meanwhile crows and grackles line up on the wires at the intersection of Main and 36th by the hundreds — a gathering of black wings.

We gathered in black and gray and red at Brown’s Funeral Home, on 70 East running into Durant. We passed the bronze plaque honoring the World’s Largest (tongue-in-cheek) peanut on the way home to my aunt’s house after the post-funeral lunch at a new Italian restaurant downtown. The food was good, the iced tea sweet. I’m still thinking about the short brown boots with a mandala stitched on the front I saw in a shop next door; I wanted those boots. I’m aware it’s just grasping at mementos of a part of me that is getting buried more deeply every day. I skip the boots.

What I did bring back: two reddish rocks from Bryan County soil to go in my garden. I’ve got one of Poppa’s handkerchiefs, a blue and gold wool shirt with a tiny hole in the pocket, and a thick sweater with woven alpacas that I brought back from Ecuador and gave to Poppa in 1993. I never saw him wear it much but apparently he rarely took in off in his final, cold months. I’ve got the obituary and service program, with a picture of him at 21 that I cut out and put into a frame. It was 1944; he would marry my grandmother within a few days. He looks handsome, hopeful, a little dreamy.

I brought back a lot of new memories of him, stories I hadn’t heard before. I didn’t know he was the only mud engineer with Baroid Drilling that many of his oilfield colleagues (the original roughnecks) would let on their rigs. My mother’s first cousin told a wonderful story about Uncle Fred taking him out on a site and walking him around, introducing him to people, how Poppa walked out on a narrow beam over a pit that was both deep and wide, as if he were a tightrope walker. As they left, my cousin asked Poppa, “What did you say to them that got us access to all that?” Poppa just smiled and looked at the sky. He never wanted to be a mud engineer in the oil fields; he wanted to be a teacher. But he became one of the best, and the oil company he worked for for 30 years transferred him to West Virginia to help drill the deepest well they’d ever done to that point. They laid him off a few years before he was due to retire.

I found out that “What in the cornbread hell are you doing?” was what he yelled when my teenaged mother drove her sister’s car into the garage wall. I found out that he used to refuse to eat a dinner that wasn’t on the table at 6:00 (my, how times have changed). Until the night my grandmother dumped a plate of homemade chicken and dumplings on his head. “What did he do? What did he do?” his great-grandchildren all asked. “He just sat there,” said his daughters.

The larger rough spots we passed over gently, talking privately, though in every life there are some. He kept his disappointments mostly to himself. He always showed up.

Lots of family were there to share in his memorial, not just three daughters and their children and grandchildren (my sister and her children were sorely missed), but his sister and brother and their children and grandchildren, and sister-in-laws and brother-in-laws and their children.

Along with others, I spoke at his funeral, thanking him for passing along his love of books and gardening. He taught me about doing what you love simply for the sake of doing it, as he staked the tomatoes, separated the irises, watered the peppers and found the best spot for the asparagus plants. I still see him most clearly in his red coveralls and straw hat, out in the back yard tending to his garden. His favorite of the gifts I gave him was a book on organic gardening. And when I am in the garden is when he is most with me. He always told me as we said goodbye, “Shannon Kathleen, fight ’em fair!” Pause, tiny grin, “And if that don’t work, fight ’em some other way.”

I already knew his favorite book was the Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam. I already knew he loved the song Greensleeves. I learned to play it on the flute for him when I was 11. At the funeral I found out one of his favorite cds was 25 versions of O Danny Boy, and so we heard that over his coffin. “But if ye come, and all the flowers are dying/If I am dead, as dead I well may be/Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying/And kneel and say an Ave there for me./And I shall hear, though soft, your tread above me,/And all my grave will warmer sweeter be./For you will bend and tell me that you love me./And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.”

He said he wanted to come back as a bull in a Montana pasture among the lowing, brown-eyed heifers. But it was my grandmother he smiled at and with in dozens of pictures we looked at through the decades. It was my grandmother he said taught him to love. They had known each other as children, and were married for 63 years. He held on for her much longer than he really wanted to be alive. Finally he ran out of breath.

He looked so different embalmed in the coffin. But I was glad I got the chance to see him, to touch his hands, to hear the things people had to say about him. He was 85 and ready to go.

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My grandmother died three weeks to the day after Poppa. She had had Alzheimer’s for several years, and there was some doubt as to whether she understood he was gone. But she cried when my aunt told her Poppa had gone on to Heaven to be with his parents and her parents. She asked, “How do you know?” tears running down her cheeks. “Because,” said my aunt, “I was there.” Nonnie never asked about him or talked about him again. But she was beyond much in the way of talking, the woman who used to love talking so much. She became increasingly distant, in a world of her own.

The last few times I saw her she did not know me and had trouble speaking, a death of the mind preceding the body. Or maybe just a death of memory. For a woman who loved the past so much, this was indeed a loss. Nonnie used to love to tell stories about her youth, growing up the oldest of 11 in a small town in Southeastern Oklahoma. She would tell stories about her Mammy, the grandmother who came west in a wagon from Tennessee, who always carried a parasol to protect her from the scorching Oklahoma sun, and wore high buttoned boots, and kept a jar of blackberry wine on a high shelf for “medicinal purposes.”

She especially loved telling the sad stories: the young mother whose skirt caught fire on wash day, the children lost in infancy, the stories of tragedy in Indian Territory seemed inexhaustible, as was her patience for them. She would tell a long winding story that you thought had lost the thread, but sure enough, she would bring the circle back to the beginning and find the close.

Born Wanda Lou, she read a book at a young age with the name ElWanda in it. She adopted it as her own, never looked back, and none of us ever knew this until later in life. The new name suited the woman she would become; from Wanda the Dust Bowl, clear-eyed girl emerged Elegant Wanda, Elegaic Wanda, Elevated Wanda, ElWanda, the lady who painted and sewed and belonged to the Flower Club and Republican Women’s Club. Her accent softened and refined. The cooking and nurturing and singing she did all her life carried over seemlessly through all the stages, until she became too weak. But even in her early 80s she could wield a large cast iron skillet with one hand, pouring out the oil while I stared in open-mouthed amazement.

Nonnie was the bedrock, a homemaker extraordinaire. She, like Poppa, might have longed for a wider life, but learned the art of blooming where you’re planted, and made deep roots. During the war, she went to college at OU and then worked in an office at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City. The first two times my grandfather proposed to her she refused. She was enjoying her taste of being a young woman out in the world. The third time, he said “ElWanda, this is the last time I’m going to ask,” and she said yes, and I don’t know that she ever worked for money again. But she never ever stopped working.

Nonnie was detail oriented, just a bit of a “control freak.” I hope I can say that because I’m a bit like her in that, can’t stand to watch someone do something I could do better without offering advice. (I know, so misguided.) We don’t really like anyone messing in our kitchen. Nonnie would let you help her cook, if you were female, and if you were open to “Honey, let me show you a little trick.” How to wash vegetables, how to peel a potato to take the least skin off, how to arrange your pantry, how to hang your laundry, how to whip your cream. She loved sweets and made wonderful desserts – often. She also monitored her own and everyone else’s weight rigorously. Josh did an affectionate parody of Nonnie that went along these lines: “Why, you look like you’ve put on a little weight. Have some pie.” You need to go on a diet, but not while you’re in my kitchen! She worked every day of her life to be the best she could be and she tried to help all of us in her care do the same.

She raged against the dying of the light so hard and so long. She used to say to me with such frustration, “Shannon, I used to be able to keep my house so beautifully. I wish you could have seen. If those doctors would just figure out what’s wrong with my legs.” Up until the day she had to go to a nursing home after a fall, she kept thinking the effects of aging were temporary and reversible, if only the doctors would figure it out. She spent the last few years, along with my grandfather, in my aunt’s home (bless her!), cared for by family and hospice workers.

She battled inner demons all her life, but in the last few months and finally weeks, she was able to let go of some of her fear of death (she was always afraid she was going to die in her sleep, as if it were a violation that had to be carefully guarded against). In her last few days, she told my mother, “I think I’m dying.” I was so grateful that she accepted what was happening in the end. She struggled so physically for breath at the end, and my mother who was there said that she would never forget the peacefulness that came over her with her final passing, the amazing release of it. I think of the funeral song, “like a bird whose prison bars have flown, I’ll fly away,” and think of it more literally now.

There was a lot of talk at her funeral, which, like my grandfather’s was beautifully presided over by my cousin, about her being together again with Poppa in a peaceful place. Many in my family talk about Heaven much more definitively than I do. I talk with my child about our spirits joining a “pool of spirits” after it leaves our bodies. I don’t see that the differences in our ideas of the afterlife are more important than the similarities.

We all loved her, we all knew her favorite colors and there was the most gorgeous array of flowers in pink, purple, crimson, and just a little blue. With Nonnie in her favorite red dress in the pale pink pearlescent casket she had picked out she was the belle of the ball. We noted that had Nonnie applied her own lipstick (as she did religiously before any Christmas or birthday photo) it would have been a brighter red.

But she looked good, she was good.

I wrote a poem about her teaching her two oldest daughters to sing when they were young girls:

Nonnie is dying,
the mighty oak, matriarch,
mother of us all.

I struggled to answer my child
when she asked me
“what is a soul?”
The soul is the part of a living being
that connects with the source of life, with God, and
can be made deeply happy by sharing
in things you love, like music, or friends,
“or dessert?” she countered. Okay.
I would add maybe something about
the soul having some continuity after the
body is done.

My mother and her sister sang
tonight for their mother,
Juanita (“ask they soul
if we should part”)
and Three White Doves,
the songs she first taught them
50+ years ago.
I think of her, a young mother,
finding each line alone,
singing it alone,
teaching it alone,

and hearing it fly back to you,
together, just the way
you hoped it would sound,
only better.

I had a dream about Nonnie back a year or so ago, when she was very ill. She was talking with us, me and my cousin C, about a fizzy orange or lemon drink she’d helped us make as children, with “creative bubbles.” She was almost happy in the way that her increasing childishness had erased so many sorrows. “Don’t forget,” she said to me, “don’t ever forget.”

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In the weeks following Nonnie’s funeral, I read a book called On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Recommended by my godmother, I found it on my mother’s bookshelf, doubly blessed. Though written in the 1960s, the book feels remarkably pertinent today, perhaps because it is written with such delicacy, and addresses such universal and unending quandaries. How do we feel about dying ourselves, or losing our loved ones? How do we talk about it? Do we talk about it? “To tell or not to tell, that is the question.” Perhaps that question has been thankfully resolved somewhat in recent decades, as I cannot imagine a physician keeping the news of terminal illness from a patient today. In any case, Kubler-Ross goes on to say, “I believe that we should make it a habit to think about death and dying occasionally, I hope before we encounter it in our own life.”

What jumped out at me was something that would be no doubt an afterthought for many readers of the book: the chapters each began with a quote from Rabindranath Tagore, such as this one: “In desperate hope I go and search for her in all the corners of my room; I find her not./My house is small and what once has gone from it can be regained./But infinite is thy mansion, my lord, and seeking her I have come to thy door…/Oh, dip my emptied life into the ocean, plunge it into the deepest fullness. Let me for once feel that lost sweet touch in the allness of the universe.” I noticed these passages because they are beautiful, of course, but more particularly, because after a lifetime of reading in which I had not come across Tagore, I was suddenly reading not one but two books in which his words were quoted.

The other book is Deepak chopra’s recent book called The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life. In it, Chopra quotes a passage again dealing with death, this time the anticipation of what it will be like to die: “The stone will melt in tears/Because I can’t remain closed to you forever./I can’t escape without being conquered./From the blue sky an eye will gaze down/To summon me in silence./I will receive death utterly at your feet.” The utter submission to an inevitable occurrence holds a lot of power for me, in the shadow of these recent losses.

But it is relatively easy to lose an aged grandparent. Both of my grandparents lived long full lives. They were in some way complete, they had finished their tasks, they had run their race. And if there was still some measure of fear or resistance, there was also acceptance and an expectation of reunion.

About the time I returned from the second funeral I found a lump in my breast. I am still in the limbo of not knowing whether it will prove to be the more common cyst that can be lived with peaceably, perhaps even reduced without significant upheaval. Or whether it will be cancer, that four friends of mine are currently struggling with. Facing death under these circumstances is quite different. There is a resistance and a hopelessness that varies with grief and anger and fear. And also a release from fear. The small stuff suddenly melts away.

I do not know what path my life will take from here. But I will be approaching it a little more pared down, a little more open. A lot more grateful if I have years, decades left to go.