“I Continue to Defy Medical Science!”
That was my grandmother Ida Skwire’s, nee Ancelitz, motto for the past 5 years, perhaps even the past ten years. But everyone has their time, and Grandma’s came last night around 11:00 PM. she’d been sick for a long time, and in fact it was almost 6 months ago that the doctors gave her a week to live. that was after the last doctor who gave her a week at most, and after the doctor before him.
I’m honestly not sure what to write about my grandmother, who was… a difficult person. Ida had fiercely liberal politics, and detested the republican party. She loved the hell out of me, and i loved her back: at the same time, I cannot and will not deny that she was a monster to my mother, raining down abuse and mistreatment on her daughter-in-law that made for difficult vacations, impossible visits, and, after Ida’s brother Ted passed on, complicated living arrangements. but the less said about that the better.
Another reason I’m not sure what to write about my grandmother is that I never made the time to interview her about what it was like growing up during the Great Depression. While she was in her 90s, Ida was lucid, her mind as sharp as a tack. Failing to interview, despite the many times I exhorted myself to do so, is a regret I’m always going to carry. I should have picked her brain for those stories: I’m sure there was a wealth of family information there, all sorts of anecdotes and oral history. And now it’s too late.
So tomorrow I believe I am going to new York for the funeral. it feels weird to say “we’re burying my grandmother”, because technically speaking, grandma left the building around 11:00 PM last night. I don’t know if I believe in the concept of the eternal soul, but one thing is certain: once that spark of life, that essence of consciousness, has left your body for good, all that’s left is your meat. So I don’t see it as burying Grandma, or even saying goodbye. The Grandma I loved checked out last night, after a decade of defying medical science, and that part of her, not being a tangible, touchable thing, really isn’t dead. Not to me anyway: her essence lives on in my memories, in my DNA.
Centuries ago, a man much smarter than me wrote this:
Chuang Tzu’s wife died. When Hui Tzu went to convey his condolences, he found Chuang Tzu sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a tub and singing. ‘You lived with her, she brought up your children and grew old,’ said Hui Tzu. ‘It should be enough simply not to weep at her death. But pounding on a tub and singing-this is going too far, isn’t it?’
“Chuang Tzu said, ‘You’re wrong. When she first died, do you think I didn’t grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there’s been another change and she’s dead. It’s just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter.
“‘Now she’s going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don’t understand anything about fate. So I stopped.’”
and also:
“The universe gives me my body so that I may be carried, my life so I may toil; my old age so I may repose, and my death so I may rest. To regard life as good is the way to regard death as good. A boat may be hidden in a creek or a mountain in a lake. These may be said to be safe. But at midnight a strong man may come and carry it away on his back. An ignorant person does not know that even when the hiding of things, large or small, is perfectly well done, still something will escape you. But if the universe is hidden in the universe itself, then there can be no escape from it. This is the great truth of things in general.
We posses our body by chance and we are already pleased with it. If our physical bodies went through ten thousand transformations without end, how incomparable would this joy be! Therefore the sage roams freely in the realm in which nothing can escape and all endures. Those who regard dying a premature death, getting old, and the beginning and the end of life as equally good are followed by others. How much more is that to which all things belong and on which the whole process of transformation depends (that is, Tao)?”
I think I need to go get a beer.
