Most of my blog readers will already know this, but I'll post here anyway: my grandmother died this weekend. Tonight was visitation; tomorrow is the funeral.
I feel very much as though time is suspended right now. As a family, we're talking and catching up, trading stories, taking care of details, and doing the things that need doing, but it feels as though we're in a strange sort of time between times...as, I suppose, we very much are.
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Thursday Thirteen: Impressions at a Memorial Service
I've not posted a Thursday Thirteen list in a long time. I like lists. They are a genre of literature all to themselves. I'm not so fond of joining things. Therefore I will compromise. I reserve the option of posting a Thursday Thirteen list but will do it without using the formatting or linkage that go along with the original and official deeliebopper.
Today was Dr. Nancy Walker's memorial service. Below are thirteen thoughts or observations that ran through my head.
1. It is cold.
2. What wonderful people are Witt and Leslie Salley (who were of great help to her and were with her when she died)! How glad I am to have met them.
3. THAT was Nancy?! (On seeing a picture of her in a poofy dress in her teen years)
4. Her mother looks very much like her, only perhaps a little softer, more approachable.
5. Her sister has a wonderful sense of humor.
6. Having people get up and speak (a "Nancy roast" Nancy and a friend called it) is so much nicer than having a sermon! (Great Scott take note. Please no sermons at my funeral!)
7. While there was not an overabundance of flowers, the stories I heard told about her today make us all bloom into laughter over and over.
8. It is amazing how many lives a teacher of teachers (or a Teacher of Teachers, as Dr. George Jenson put it) can impact. She potentially influences and inspires not just her own students, but their students as well.
9. I did not know that she went back to finish her degree after her daughter's death. Somehow it seemed to me that she'd probably always been clicking through the halls of higher education, setting students quivering in their boots with one glance over her tiny wire-rimmed glasses.
10. Van Morrison's music can be perfect for a memorial service.
11. It is good to let down the guard of professional veneer and be human.
12. The passing of an exceptional person brings choking grief, but borne together with others who loved and appreciated her, that grief is somehow transformed into a shared joy in having known her.
13. Nancy was an exceptional person. One of the characteristics that made her such was that she treated those who knew her as exceptional people as well, worthy of being listened to, capable of accomplishing their goals, and unique and valuable in themselves. I was struck, as person after person, student after student, colleague after colleague stood to honor her, by how right she was.
Today was Dr. Nancy Walker's memorial service. Below are thirteen thoughts or observations that ran through my head.
1. It is cold.
2. What wonderful people are Witt and Leslie Salley (who were of great help to her and were with her when she died)! How glad I am to have met them.
3. THAT was Nancy?! (On seeing a picture of her in a poofy dress in her teen years)
4. Her mother looks very much like her, only perhaps a little softer, more approachable.
5. Her sister has a wonderful sense of humor.
6. Having people get up and speak (a "Nancy roast" Nancy and a friend called it) is so much nicer than having a sermon! (Great Scott take note. Please no sermons at my funeral!)
7. While there was not an overabundance of flowers, the stories I heard told about her today make us all bloom into laughter over and over.
8. It is amazing how many lives a teacher of teachers (or a Teacher of Teachers, as Dr. George Jenson put it) can impact. She potentially influences and inspires not just her own students, but their students as well.
9. I did not know that she went back to finish her degree after her daughter's death. Somehow it seemed to me that she'd probably always been clicking through the halls of higher education, setting students quivering in their boots with one glance over her tiny wire-rimmed glasses.
10. Van Morrison's music can be perfect for a memorial service.
11. It is good to let down the guard of professional veneer and be human.
12. The passing of an exceptional person brings choking grief, but borne together with others who loved and appreciated her, that grief is somehow transformed into a shared joy in having known her.
13. Nancy was an exceptional person. One of the characteristics that made her such was that she treated those who knew her as exceptional people as well, worthy of being listened to, capable of accomplishing their goals, and unique and valuable in themselves. I was struck, as person after person, student after student, colleague after colleague stood to honor her, by how right she was.
Friday, December 01, 2006
Dr. Nancy L. Walker
This morning I opened my inbox to find an email from a stranger, but one who was a friend of a friend. My friend, a beloved one-time teacher, has died.
Nancy Walker taught composition and rhetoric classes for years at Missouri State University, although when Great Scott and I attended her classes and sought her out in her third floor office, MSU was SMSU, Southwest Missouri State University. The transition from one name to another was difficult to make, almost as difficult as trying to imagine the university without her after her retirement a couple of years ago. To try to imagine the world without her will be harder yet. I do not think I can do it. I know I do not wish to. Blessedly, I do not have to. "Everything is to the point," she often said. That saying is only one of many things about her that has become as much a part of me as the permanent callous on the side of my right middle finger, the one worn by the friction of pen against flesh.
We had kept in loose contact over the last 15 years since my leaving all pretense of academia. Great Scott saw her occasionally after he began working again on a master's degree. Only last week I'd emailed her. This morning after reading of her death, I found one of her essays (excerpt below) in the online archives of The Oklahoma Review. She was a most exceptional person. She will be missed beyond measure.
Nancy Walker taught composition and rhetoric classes for years at Missouri State University, although when Great Scott and I attended her classes and sought her out in her third floor office, MSU was SMSU, Southwest Missouri State University. The transition from one name to another was difficult to make, almost as difficult as trying to imagine the university without her after her retirement a couple of years ago. To try to imagine the world without her will be harder yet. I do not think I can do it. I know I do not wish to. Blessedly, I do not have to. "Everything is to the point," she often said. That saying is only one of many things about her that has become as much a part of me as the permanent callous on the side of my right middle finger, the one worn by the friction of pen against flesh.
We had kept in loose contact over the last 15 years since my leaving all pretense of academia. Great Scott saw her occasionally after he began working again on a master's degree. Only last week I'd emailed her. This morning after reading of her death, I found one of her essays (excerpt below) in the online archives of The Oklahoma Review. She was a most exceptional person. She will be missed beyond measure.
A chickadee (life-span twelve years) chatters at the bird feeder, snatching a sunflower seed to relish on a near-by oak branch. A cardinal (life-span fifteen years) sits on an oak branch while the bluebirds (life-span eight years) dip in the bird bath. A bank of leaves surrounds the still-blooming geraniums -- the inevitable transition from autumn to winter when time goes south slowly.
Friday, November 10, 2006
Screech Owl
Yesterday afternoon when I stopped at the mailbox on my way to pick up the girls, a dead bird about the same body size of a dove was lying beside the driveway. I walked past it on the way back to the car, and suddenly a small detail registered: feathered toes. I retraced my steps, stooped to lift the ruffled body in my hands and found I was holding a small, grey screech owl, not long dead, still soft and pliable, one wing broken and hanging at an odd angle, one eye missing, but with no blood or guts marring its perfection. Its feathers were as soft as mist, softer than The Great Golden Sun Cat's white belly, so soft my fingertips could barely feel them at all. "Oh, baby," I heard myself breath involuntarily, "I'm so sorry." I laid him in the shade behind the mailbox, and on the way home stopped to pick him up, laying him on some papers on The Younger Daughter's lap in the backseat.
When we got to the house, the girls and I held him and gently admired him, straightening his broken wing and tucking it back against his body. We stroked his white and grey breast and with our index fingers traced his legs and feet, the feathers as fine as fur upon his curled toes. Carefully I lifted his "ear" tufts to show the girls what he would have looked like with them aloft, then smoothed them down again. At last, spade in hand, we took his small body to the northern creek where the screech owls call on summer evenings. The Older Daughter guarded him from Tongue Depressor Kitty while I dug a hole. We lined it with long autumn grasses, laid him in the nest and covered him over with more grasses and finally soft, rich dirt. The Younger Daughter said a prayer. We scattered dead leaves over the newly disturbed earth and left buckbrush, its arcing branches full of bright berries and paling leaves, on the grave.
When we got to the house, the girls and I held him and gently admired him, straightening his broken wing and tucking it back against his body. We stroked his white and grey breast and with our index fingers traced his legs and feet, the feathers as fine as fur upon his curled toes. Carefully I lifted his "ear" tufts to show the girls what he would have looked like with them aloft, then smoothed them down again. At last, spade in hand, we took his small body to the northern creek where the screech owls call on summer evenings. The Older Daughter guarded him from Tongue Depressor Kitty while I dug a hole. We lined it with long autumn grasses, laid him in the nest and covered him over with more grasses and finally soft, rich dirt. The Younger Daughter said a prayer. We scattered dead leaves over the newly disturbed earth and left buckbrush, its arcing branches full of bright berries and paling leaves, on the grave.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Eulogy
Today was the funeral. The temperature was chilly and dropping this morning, with a brisk wind and thickly clouded skies. It felt like late October for this part of the country. My grandmother is cautious about getting out in cold weather since a bad winter a couple of years ago during which we nearly lost her to pneumonia and heart complications, so she decided not to attend the graveside services, although she did still want to go to Jane's funeral.
As I sat beside my grandmother in the funeral home, I had to wonder if things could get much worse. The pianist was...well, rusty might be a kind word. The singers were...very...they knew most of the words. And the speaker was...well intentioned, I'm sure. I sat in a pink, vinyl padded chair that made startling noises when one shifted one's weight and tried to hold very still. I counted lonely looking carnations in a couple of scraggly funeral arrangements. I considered the wallpaper border, the strategically placed boxes of Kleenex and the polyester suit jackets of the gentlemen in front of us. I remembered passing out in this room when I was twelve, at my piano teacher's husband's funeral. I remembered standing jam-packed here when I was fourteen with my friends at a crowded funeral for one of our close classmates whose brother had shot him, their step-mother and step-sister after school one day. I remembered a double funeral here ten years ago for two of a good friend's brothers, killed in a car wreck when one fell asleep at the wheel late at night. I remembered visitation in this room seven years ago, after my grandfather died; it was overflowing with flowers then, full of friends and family, photographs and shared memories. That night, the night it should have been least bearable for me, given the closeness of our family, it was a good place to be. I listened again to the halting piano playing, the somewhat wandering singing, the rather befuddling (or befuddled) speaker. I let my gaze linger on the lavender roses in the lavishly lovely casket spray. I considered the way the men in the polyester jackets put their arms around their wives or bowed their heads during the prayer, the way they slowly made their way down the aisle to pay their last respects, hats in hand.
Good Lord, the last thing I want at my funeral is music like this or this kind of speaking! But..the people. If good people could say of me what I heard a young man behind me saying of Jane...I could maybe bear even this room. "The Bible says to man is alloted eighty years. Jane had ninety-three, and she used that gift well."
To use our gift well, not in light of accomplishments or successes, but in light of people, of lives touched. I cannot think of a better eulogy.
As I sat beside my grandmother in the funeral home, I had to wonder if things could get much worse. The pianist was...well, rusty might be a kind word. The singers were...very...they knew most of the words. And the speaker was...well intentioned, I'm sure. I sat in a pink, vinyl padded chair that made startling noises when one shifted one's weight and tried to hold very still. I counted lonely looking carnations in a couple of scraggly funeral arrangements. I considered the wallpaper border, the strategically placed boxes of Kleenex and the polyester suit jackets of the gentlemen in front of us. I remembered passing out in this room when I was twelve, at my piano teacher's husband's funeral. I remembered standing jam-packed here when I was fourteen with my friends at a crowded funeral for one of our close classmates whose brother had shot him, their step-mother and step-sister after school one day. I remembered a double funeral here ten years ago for two of a good friend's brothers, killed in a car wreck when one fell asleep at the wheel late at night. I remembered visitation in this room seven years ago, after my grandfather died; it was overflowing with flowers then, full of friends and family, photographs and shared memories. That night, the night it should have been least bearable for me, given the closeness of our family, it was a good place to be. I listened again to the halting piano playing, the somewhat wandering singing, the rather befuddling (or befuddled) speaker. I let my gaze linger on the lavender roses in the lavishly lovely casket spray. I considered the way the men in the polyester jackets put their arms around their wives or bowed their heads during the prayer, the way they slowly made their way down the aisle to pay their last respects, hats in hand.
Good Lord, the last thing I want at my funeral is music like this or this kind of speaking! But..the people. If good people could say of me what I heard a young man behind me saying of Jane...I could maybe bear even this room. "The Bible says to man is alloted eighty years. Jane had ninety-three, and she used that gift well."
To use our gift well, not in light of accomplishments or successes, but in light of people, of lives touched. I cannot think of a better eulogy.
From Light to Light
Tuesday morning I took my nearly 90 year-old grandmother on a trip to her doctor's. From the waiting room windows I could see across the highway to a lovely golf course with a fountain and lots of trees and open swaths of grass, a beautiful view. Doing my best to ignore Family Feud on the waiting room television, I opened my journal and took out a fountain pen.
9:22 a.m.
The sun is shining this morning The trees throw light back from their leaves, leaves that are showing the beginning of the autumn change, some darkening, some paling, some shifting from the greens they've held so faithfully all summer. The air is relatively still today. The sunshine lies stretched across the golf course lawn like a languorous cat. In the fountain, water glints and flashes as it ripples to the sides. The air glows about us, a lazy, living thing.
I've always loved autumn, the quieting of the natural world, the softening of the crickets' and cicadas' intense songs, the hush of wind through drying grasses, the graceful silver of spiders' balloon threads streaming from every rising stem across the fields as the lowering western sun sets them afire.
3:10 p.m.
I've been at my grandmother's all afternoon, since we returned home. A few minutes ago she got a call from a good friend's sister, telling her that Jane died this morning. My grandmother had just been putting together a copy of the local paper, intending to take it to Jane this evening.
I'm not sure what "this morning" meant, whether Jane breathed from life to life in the sleepy darkness of predawn or in the bright sunshine of the mid-morning I wrote about only hours ago. Either way, I like to think she stepped from one world to the next nimbly, her feet newly quickened and sure, a bright smile on her face as her Beloved took her hand to steady her crossing.
Autumn is a beautiful time of year. The leaves, of course, are gorgeous. It's the quality of light, though, that I love fiercely; there is something brighter, more immediate about it, as though it shines richly forth from another realm, one that draws closer to this world as the earth dutifully begins her descent into the winter darkness that precedes a more brilliant light and life. I'd never really thought of it all that way until Tuesday with Jane's passing and all this amazing, painfully glorious light.
9:22 a.m.
The sun is shining this morning The trees throw light back from their leaves, leaves that are showing the beginning of the autumn change, some darkening, some paling, some shifting from the greens they've held so faithfully all summer. The air is relatively still today. The sunshine lies stretched across the golf course lawn like a languorous cat. In the fountain, water glints and flashes as it ripples to the sides. The air glows about us, a lazy, living thing.
I've always loved autumn, the quieting of the natural world, the softening of the crickets' and cicadas' intense songs, the hush of wind through drying grasses, the graceful silver of spiders' balloon threads streaming from every rising stem across the fields as the lowering western sun sets them afire.
3:10 p.m.
I've been at my grandmother's all afternoon, since we returned home. A few minutes ago she got a call from a good friend's sister, telling her that Jane died this morning. My grandmother had just been putting together a copy of the local paper, intending to take it to Jane this evening.
I'm not sure what "this morning" meant, whether Jane breathed from life to life in the sleepy darkness of predawn or in the bright sunshine of the mid-morning I wrote about only hours ago. Either way, I like to think she stepped from one world to the next nimbly, her feet newly quickened and sure, a bright smile on her face as her Beloved took her hand to steady her crossing.
Autumn is a beautiful time of year. The leaves, of course, are gorgeous. It's the quality of light, though, that I love fiercely; there is something brighter, more immediate about it, as though it shines richly forth from another realm, one that draws closer to this world as the earth dutifully begins her descent into the winter darkness that precedes a more brilliant light and life. I'd never really thought of it all that way until Tuesday with Jane's passing and all this amazing, painfully glorious light.
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