I wrote these words on Sunday, August 10, 2008.
The day my Grandmother died.
The way she died was beautiful.
She was a widow long before I was born who outlived two of her three children. For as long as I can remember, Grandma Blair slept in a single bed. I asked her once when I was around eight why she slept in a kid’s bed. “No point in a bigger one,” she told me. “And I like the extra space in my room.” Grandma lived much of her life alone with its most significant events being tragedies.
Or at least those are the events I remember. Her mother died when she was young. Her father sent her, her sister, and brothers to live with others. She worked hard all her life. And then, She meet a man. A man who convinced her that he would kill himself if she didn’t marry him and from that inauspicious beginning an uneasy marriage ensued. It ended with him dying young and leaving her with a family to support on her own. She worked at a Christian outreach for children all her life yet when it came time for the outreach to take care of her, they basically stopped reaching out. Fortunately, there were those, whom her life had touched, who still sent her support after she got sick. Her only son died unexpectedly in his sleep and her eldest daughter died tragically.
Although, there must have been some happy moments in her personal life. Over half a century later she still kept the big wedding picture out and had it prominently displayed wherever she lived. I will never forget her blue dress in that picture as she stands next to a man I never knew. My grandfather, who looks to me like the farmer with the pitchfork in the painting “American Gothic.” Accept Grandpa’s in a nice suit. And as the years grew and the family grew with more and more grandchildren and great-grandchildren, so did the number of pictures that surrounded her. Even in dementia, she still loved to look at her collection of photos.
I used to go to Binghamton, New York, before the cancer and dementia, and visit Grandma Blair with her cramped little trailer home in the north woods by the stream. We would drive into town, go to lunch at Applebee’s, and talk about life. I found out in those visits that underneath the veneer of tragedy and isolation was the spirit of a mystic who spent much of her time in quiet contemplation with God. America is a hard place to be a contemplative. We are a people of surfaces and materialism. We don’t have much time for those who live life listening to their souls. It makes us nervous. Ethel Blair communicated with God as if he were her true love, her confidant, and friend.
God had all the time in the world for Ethel, and she knew it. When most of us say we are going to talk to God, we’re speaking metaphorically. Grandma truly talked with God. She prayed without ceasing and in everything gave thanks. Over an oriental chicken rollup in a Binghamton Applebee’s she talked about God like she and He were an old married couple. I always saw the love in her eyes when she talked about Him. What she didn’t have in the material world, she made up for in her relationship with Him.
But this isn’t supposed to be words about her life. It’s about her death. For a woman who lived most of her life by herself, the odds were pretty good that she would die by herself. Most of us do. She did not. She died in a double bed, her bed for the last year-and-a-half when she moved in with my parents. She died Sunday, August 10, 2008 at approximately 9:00 in the morning Eastern Standard Time. For many years this was the time she began teaching children about Jesus.
She died in that double bed next to her daughter, Bonnie Jean who was washing her and gently brushing her hair. She died next to someone who loved her as unconditionally as I believe is humanly possible on this planet.
To release your last breath
Surrounded by love
The unconditional love of your daughter
The unconditional love of your God
What could be more beautiful?
The rest of us should be so lucky.
Good-bye Grandma Blair
Love,
Your grandson, Daniel
