I Woke Up to This Memory Today
The day of my Grandmother’s funeral it was freezing cold and sleeting. We were the only ones in the church, five small marks in a behemoth of a cathedral I had always been afraid to go into as a child. That day, we all sat in the first pew, next to each other but with enough space between us for comfort. No one else came to the funeral, not even my Aunt Mildred, now the only living relative on my father’s side. We left her at home; my father thought she wouldn’t be up to it, and we couldn’t have her catching pneumonia with the weather. But it’s not like she didn’t want to be there. It just wasn’t easy.
I remember the church was so big and so beautiful at that moment. Her shiny, oiled coffin rested perpendicular to the main aisle, topped with a display of appropriate flowers signifying death. Some of them were Lilies of the Valley, her favorite. My mother never let us grow those in our backyard. “They are unlucky,” she’d say. “You only use those kinds of flowers when somebody dies.”
The priest was long removed from a line of priests I used to remember, back when we sporadically attended mass. He spoke as though he actually knew her, and I wondered if he may have, before she got sick, before we moved her to an assisted living home, before her brain broke down and she became unrecognizable to me. He talked about all the things she liked to do, and that she was enjoying heaven now, that maybe she was even up there painting. I started to cry.
My Grandmother loved painting, but after she got sick, her motor skills diminished. She would sit us on a stool in her basement and show us her latest work - a landscape of Pennsylvania, a clown holding colorful balloons, a pin-up girl getting ready in her dressing room. Sometimes she would paint squirrels, or dogs, or birds building a nest. She copied from pictures she’d clip out of magazines - she had never actually been to any of the places that she painted. But she was a true artist, she could have painted anything she saw.
When we visited her in the hospital a few weeks before she died, they brought us to a room where all of the patients went to socialize (if you could really call it that). I saw, tacked on a wall, a Xerox copy of a pilgrim and an indian, left over from Thanksgiving. It was not colored in nicely, rather, red and yellow and orange scribbles zig-zagged in and out of the lines, forming clouds of color over the entire page. “Terri” was written underneath, clearly from a different hand. My Grandmother, who once taught us color theory, line, detail and shape appreciation and design application, was responsible for a barely discernible, kindergartner level scribble.
My Grandmother was dead a year before she died, and part of me is thankful for that. It allowed us time to process her disease, to say our goodbyes and to become estranged before the moment hit and she was actually gone. Hers is one of only a handful of funerals I’ve ever been to; I’m lucky in that way.
I really hope she got to where she wants to go, and that there is always something beautiful and interesting for her to paint.
