Two Wednesdays ago, on October 24, my Grandma Jeffrey woke up early, as she always did. She made a pot of oatmeal for breakfast, as she did most mornings, and then she accompanied my grandfather, her husband of 61 years, to Fitness over Fifty. Afterwards, they delivered Meals On Wheels together. They valued their independence so much that they felt deeply for those who didn't have it. This was just one of the ways that they gave back.
At home in the early afternoon, they raked leaves on their large, sloping lawn. The vibrant colors in one of the leaves caught my grandmother’s eye, and she twirled it in her fingers and slipped it inside my grandfather’s breast pocket. She must have chuckled as she did so, the soft, throaty laugh that everyone around her knew so well.
An hour later, upon walking into the downstairs level of the home where she had lived for more than five decades, she placed her foot on the stairs and immediately fell backwards.
Gone.
Her heart stopped beating in the middle of a clear fall day. A day spent going and doing and laughing. Just the way she would have wanted it.
Only too soon.
What can I say about her that doesn’t sound trite? She had eight children, twenty-nine grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. She loved us fiercely. Nothing made her happier than to get us all together and take pictures of us. Her photos filled albums and envelopes and frames, crowding her refrigerator with faces and expressions. She always wanted one more shot.
She cooked vegetables until they turned grey, baked turkey until it became the texture of sawdust, made gravy out of a packet, but her table was full of stories and jokes and gentle teasing. She loved to travel. She loved to read. She saved absolutely everything, from rubber bands to aprons. Her closets were full to bursting with clothes and Reader’s Digests and newspaper clippings from every decade.
To see her smile, you might have thought that she lived a charmed life, but it wasn't always so. She grew up in a tense domestic landscape, with a father prone to fits of rage. Her only sibling, a brother, took his own life. Decades later, the incident was still so painful that she could scarcely speak about it.
When she and my grandfather found each other, in the early 1940's, they fell swiftly and deeply in love, and they held on tight. Their relationship was one of quiet devotion and shared joy. During sixty-one years together, they rarely spent the night apart. At family gatherings, or at church, or at any of the many events they attended, they always sat close to each other, chuckling over shared jokes.
On that Wednesday, my grandfather's heart broke. "I've lost my angel," he kept saying, over and over.
She was vibrant and twinkly and special.
Mostly, she was ours.
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The things you discover after someone is gone:
My grandfather never liked oatmeal. All those years, all those breakfasts together, he ate it without complaint.
“I prefer cold cereal,” he says now. We are trying to soak him up, to memorize his gentle Texas drawl, to notice the way he moves his hands, trying to appreciate him even more than we already do, feeling her presence through him. Knowing that even if we have him for another ten years, or twenty, it won’t seem like nearly long enough.
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My last conversation with her:
Three weeks before she died, I called my Grandma to say hello. It was a Friday evening, and I called around 6, thinking that I didn't want to call too late, in case they were going to bed early. But when she answered the phone, she was cheerful and bright, and I could hear noise in the background.
"Some of your cousins are here," she said. "As soon as we finish dinner, we'll get ready and go to the football game!" She and my grandfather were lifelong Oregon State fans; they'd be rooting for the orange and brown on the field that night.
"Grandma," I told her, "you're having a more exciting Friday night than I am!"
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How do we let go of those whom we love? How do we step out of grief’s shadow and back into life?
I honestly don't know.
Loss has bruised my heart in recent weeks. I haven’t yet learned to let go gracefully.
I imagine that if my grandma was here, sitting with me and talking about loss, that she might cry with me, and then say: “It just takes time.”
And so it does.
