Holes In The Floor of Heaven

I have decided that Facebook Marketplace is the modern-day equivalent to the 1980's Swap Shop I once listened to on the radio with my Grandma Gorley. I was five and then six, and I would listen intently to the person on the other end of that little black and dusty boom box prattle off their goods they wanted to trade or barter and try to determine their faces in my mind's eye.  Some of the callers had deep and gruff voices, and they wore their lifestyle habits in their throats as badges of courage or years of cigarette use, take your pick.  You could hear the thick sadness curled up inside of them as they spoke, addressing no one specifically and everyone all together.  I wondered about the lives of so many of those people.  What were their jobs?  Did they have children?  What color hair did they have, and was it straight or curly?  What crops had they harvested with that Deere 4640, and why on earth would someone need collection of 475 baseball cards commemorating players who'd already kicked the bucket?  Also, you must trust strangers an awful lot to buy a pie from their kitchen when you couldn't even spy on them to see whether they licked the spoon as they were preparing it!  If I had been grown and needed to swap a lemon pie for babysitting, well, wouldn't it just make more sense to bake it my own self and save myself the hassle of shepherding other people's kids? 

Yes, I would sit in my grandpa's armchair and be elsewhere at the same time, thinking so hard I would forget to blink. Sure, I am grateful for the convenience of technology and all, but these days...just...wow.  We can order food from some kind of button on our phones and it can be delivered to our doorstep within the half hour rather than feel that tinge of self-serving satisfaction that comes only with being at a certain level of hunger where you could certainly take it but are proud of yourself for leaving it!  There are actually bracelets to be worn that can tell you almost everything about yourself you ever wanted to know, should anything like your heart rate or your hours at rest ever slip your mind, or should you choose to do something so mundane as to count every step you take that day like you are counting railroad cars as they zoom past you while parked first behind the crossing guard arms!  Cameras on telephones can add sparkles to our eyes and blur out even the most telling sign of hormonal havoc that might pop up on our skin instead of turning the Polaroid around backward and hoping for the best!  You can shop without ever seeing the light of day and it, too, can be brought to your Royal Highness within a matter of hours!  And if you're really lucky or deprived, depending on who you ask, you can ride a sharp-looking scooter around big cities instead of bicycles up and down dirt roads, and arrange to be picked up by Uber instead of your grandmother at dusk!  Sure, I appreciate all of these inventions of scientific know-how, but sometimes I really miss the olden days.  

I guess one of the best things about being this age is that we have seen the world whenever it was a different time.  For those of us older than 30, we remember a day when folks stopped to give directions and look us square in the eye to make sure we are getting it, are you understanding me?, and not have their heads down and necks bent, all their attention given to the little device at the ends of their arms.   We remember a time when couples married and stuck it out no matter what instead of throwing in the towel and calling it quits because it is simply too difficult to try any harder.  We have seen a relatively different baseline of normal and good compared to the kids out there today.  We have witnessed people who are genuine and sincere because that is how they were taught to treat others.  And now?  Now it is almost a miracle to get someone to call you back in a decent amount about an issue that could take hours to line out over text messaging.  

When I was given the information that my grandmother was ill, sickly, I cannot sit here and say truthfully that I wasn't worried about her.  My grandmother had always been strong, a survivor of so many vile and bemoaning demons.  She was an overcomer; a heroine of her own life.  She elected for no treatment, no drugs until the end, nothing.  It is my belief that it is okay and acceptable to be fine with ceasing to improve one's health condition based on the weak statistics that modern science and its subsequent studies tell us.  We see commercials on television and ads in glossy magazines for drugs that are supposed to fight the enemy, cancer, but then make the quiet disclaimer at the back of the book that such treatment may cause thisthisandthis.  But if someone is as old as my grandmother, which was 82, isn't it fine to call it good and just let the disease take you even if the only reason is because you are tired and just long to rest?  I certainly think so.  

The last time I saw my grandma was about 20 minutes before she passed away.  Her hospital bed was in the corner of the living room where no doubt my cousins and aunts had her positioned so that she could watch The Food Network yammer on about a fancy recipe on the television across the room.  And the time before that?  She had been on the couch.  I had come in and had brought my kids, her great-grandchildren, with me.  I had just broken the news to them on the drive from school to her house.  "It's probably time that you came over," my cousin Marie had warned me, and I pictured her long blonde hair and blue eyes and then Chanel, that dog of hers with the cinnamon bun tail, all spun around like a twirled-up fuzzy sausage link.  There was sadness in her voice as she said it.  

I walked over to her on the couch.  Her eyes had been closed.  I saw a movement under her covers, and she sighed and turned her head slightly.  "Grandma?"  I whispered.  Nothing. 

I went back to my chair on the far end of the living room, cross my legs, but when I see how wide my thighs look when I do this, I uncross them again.  The truth of it all is too loud.  I scan the room and my hands in my lap, looking for something to talk about or somebody's face to read.  Grandma was never one to hang pictures of our family on the walls...or any other artwork, for that matter.  But there was always one picture that I can remember being on the wall from the time I was very, very young, and it is probably still there, even now.  It is a black stretch of velvet with a worn etching of a bull rider added or adhered to it.  There is her anniversary clock whose glass dome met its fate and consequently its demise to the floor, fragile and see-through just like she had always been.  And then there is her family Bible on the bottom shelf of the TV stand.  This, too, had been in the same spot probably as long as I had been alive.  It was the color of eggshell and there on the front was the animated face of Jesus staring at something in the sky above him, His robe slightly brown and aged from years of dust stirred up by passers by.  And then there was her candy jar over by the gas stove right beside my chair.  I picked it up and held it, closed my eyes, thinking maybe all it requires is a certain kind of belief and you really can go back in time.  Then, she wouldn't be sick anymore.  She could get up and cook something delicious.  Then, I could be five and six again and we could take grandpa his lunch down at the butcher plant.  I wish hard, and open my eyes.  Naturally, I am nowhere else and my grandma didn't raise up from her slumber and quick! hop out of bed.  I am actually sort of surprised. 

I always think incipient miracles surround us, waiting only to see if our faith is strong enough.  If I am standing at a traffic light before I cross a street, I stare at the people on the other side, thinking, why can't we just concentrate, and change places?  And I have a real belief that this kind of thing will eventually come to be, this convenient kind of transmigration.  "Come over for dinner, why don't you?" we will say into the phone to our friends in California when we are in Wisconsin.  And moments later they will appear, shiny with stardust, briefly shaken but mostly without memory of how it happened that they arrived.  We won't have to understand it; it will just work, like a beating heart, like love.  Really, no matter how frightened and discouraged I may become about the future, I look forward to it.  In spite of everything I see all around me every day, in spite of all the times I cry when I read the newspaper, I have a shaky reassurance that everything will turn out fine.  I don't think I'm the only one.  Why else would the phrase "Everything's all right" ease a deep and troubled place in so many of us?  We just don't know, we never know so much, yet we have such faith.  We hold our hands over our hurts and lean forward, full of yearning and forgiveness.  It is how we keep on, this kind of hope.  

I go back over to her bedside, and leaning down to her, I feel a hot rush of tears well up in my eyes.  I am afraid to blink for fear of my tears spilling out onto her face, we are that close, she and I.  "Grandma?"  I venture.  Then, "Thank you for loving me like you did.  Thank you for all you ever did for me.  I love you."  That is something we never heard much, I love you.  We were just supposed to know it by the things she did for everyone.  We are all family, and we were supposed to love one another.  In grandma and grandpa's house, it was just something nobody fessed up to, the emotionality that came with loving someone else.  You did what you did because you were expected to do it and that was that, plain and simple.  Showing emotion was a luxury my family could not afford, and a mockery was made of those who could.  It was in that instant that I could not tell if I felt shame all those years when I said it, or felt shame because I never met people who loved each other but were too afraid to tell each other that very thing.  Those words were foreign and not so welcome there, and I never have quite understood why. 

I kneel down beside her, close my eyes, and try to remember everything about the first time grandma tried to help me learn how to sew.  You take what you can get.  That is another one of the lessons here.  My grandma was a fine seamstress, and quilts were her jam.  It was from this woman that I inherited my love of fabric.  Back when I lived with them, grandma and I would head out to our little Wal-Mart Discount City, the very building that is the Orschelin's store now.  Why, grandma and I could spend an hour or better at the fabric section there.  She was the only woman I have ever met whose fascination for the fabric section matched mine.  The colors.  The quiet undercurrent of industry.  The tactile pleasure and smells of jewel-colored silks, calico cottons, wide-wale curduroy, pristine interfacings.  We enjoyed looking through pattern books, especially when they got old and you could feel the history of so many hands on them.  We loved the racks of buttons, all with personalities: shy pearls, flamboyant rhinestones, sensible round navy-blue buttons, lined up three in a somber row -- Grandma said if they were little girls they'd all go to Catholic school.  Every time we went there we admired the expensive scissors kept behind a glass case, and one Christmas I remember my mother gave grandma a pair.  She made a house for those scissors -- lined a drawer with a scrap of black velvet and kept nothing but them there.  I was a novice at sewing and struggled through each thing I attempted.  Grandma made quilts, pillows, dresses for my aunts and me, shirts for my grandpa, a fold-up doll case with a barnyard on one side and a castle on the other, and little dolls tucked into each scene, seatcovers for the chairs at the dining table out of gorgeous French florals whose very presence on their five-foot-long bolts intimidated me.  When winter came, grandma would crank the gas stove up slightly in the living room and light the burner on the kitchen stove and spend what little spare time she had piecing together quilts on her bed, which was in the kitchen back then, not the living room.  The wind rattled the windows and occasionally, with thrilling gusts, pushed itself into the house with us.  But we were warm and distracted, sitting in our long-sleeved shirts and flannel shirts and sweatpants and thick socks.  Her hair was secured up off her face with several of her bobby pins and there would be the low hum of the television and my grandpa would be reading a book while grandma would be making her art that would last for years.  We were protected.  And, we were loved...even if nobody ever said it. 

When the time came for my kids to say their final goodbyes, they did so with what I thought was great courage.  They came into her house like they always had, only this time grandma was smaller.  She had been on oxygen and was surrounded by the huge mechanical canister that probably weighed as much as she did.  Molly burst into tears after asking her how she was feeling.  Grace seemed afraid to approach, and I guess I expected that because I believe the scared spirit of my mother lives within Grace.  I feel like Grace Ann senses so much that she never even tells me, like she is an old and wise woman living in the body of a baby, confused and caged in like a wild animal who doesn't belong.  Griffin smiled big and dopey, zipping his coat up to his chin as he leaned over to hug her.  They each told her how much they loved her and she sat up to embrace them, and the moments were tender.  Grandma, in and out and a little nonsensical because of the morphine, called to my aunt, "Betsy?  Get that chair over there so Elizabeth Ann can take our picture."  Another new thing.  Grandma always hid from the camera.  Said for each picture you took was a year off her life.  She would hide her face or turn her head to avoid being captured on film, but not this night.  Aunt Betsy scurried to get the chair grandma wanted, and then helped her up from the couch to support her as she re-positioned herself in the chair in the middle of the living room.  

Grandma gathered the kids around her and tried her best to smile.  As I took my ';pictures, I saw a glimmer of regret in her eyes, pools of sorrow and longing swirled around in there deep.  She sat upright, which had to have been uncomfortable for her given the nature of the disease.  And like grandma's coveted blankets she made for us through the years, or the outlandish spreads of various mealtime favorites at many a holiday meals, that day was perhaps one of the greatest gestures of love she had ever shown me:  She wanted me to take pictures of her with my children, something for us all to remember her by.

The kids and I miss you, Grandma, and we will miss you next week on Thanksgiving.  I love you, Grandma, and I have always loved you, even when I was too afraid to tell you and even during the times I did not come 'round to visit.  If I had one more day to spend with you, just one, I would take time to ask you more questions and write down the parts you would want me to pass along to my own little family.  If I had more time with you, I would ask you questions about my mother since you were the first of us to know her.  I would let you tell me the parts about your upbringing that you never thought you would share with another human being, not ever.  I would let you tell me and then I would lock away the details until I had the wisdom to sort through them on my own.  Mostly, though, I would make more of an effort to get to know you on a more authentic level.  I am sorry I didn't do that, now, and after the fact.  I am sorry I failed to see how important it might have been for us both.  I have read that so very many different things can be generational in nature:  Skills, experiences, attitudes, and knowledge.  It is a combination of these things that result from occupying a particular role for a certain period of time that those of us can count on now that you are gone.  My exposure to these attributes I witnessed in you make me who I am today, and I am proud to say that it is YOU who taught me to love unapologetically and wholly in ways that do not necessarily need to be talked about or announced.  Thank you for showing me love so that I would then be able to give love to others.  

1 Corinthians 13:4-8 New International Version (NIV)4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

1 Corinthians 13:13 New International Version (NIV)
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

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