Snowball Fight!

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Nanny goes home

Sixteen months ago, Nanny's doctors told her to get her affairs in order following a severe internal bleeding episode and subsequent diagnosis of terminal liver disease. The situation was tenuous and I immediately flew out west to say my goodbyes.

Sixteen months ago.

Since then I've been in regular contact, either by phone or e-mail, with Aunt Becky and Aunt Sandra. They both discouraged visits due to Nanny's decline and fear of having Evan and Lora see her in such shape. We weighed the options and acquiesced but her demise hung over our heads like a dark cloud. For sixteen months.

About a month ago, Aunt Becky called Joan in desperation. Times were tough, she needed some relief, and felt like the kids might brighten the place up. Evan had a couple of in-service days coming up at school so we flew out early on a Saturday morning. Having said my goodbyes sixteen months ago, I wasn't looking forward to having to do it again, but sometimes you can't get around the hard stuff.

We had a great visit. Nanny's mind was sharp, she ate well (for her condition), the kids kept the farm hopping, riding the golf cart and chasing the dogs around. On Tuesday morning, Evan and I flew home. The next Tuesday, Joan and Lora flew home.

On Wednesday night, Aunt Becky called to tell us that it was just a matter of time. Shortly after Joan and Lora left the day before, Nanny had become unresponsive. Aunt Becky asked if we wanted a call if she died in the night. We told her we did.

At 2:00 a.m., the phone rang.

I had been aware that this moment was coming. For sixteen months. When it came, I was blown away at how profound one death could be. We've lost more than 2800 soldiers in Iraq. More than 2900 people died in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Two-hundred-fifty thousand people died in the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. None of those deaths affected me like the death of a frail, eighty-one year-old woman in the basement apartment of a farm house on the Eastern Plains of Colorado.

Appropriately, Nanny died during an uncharacteristically heavy autumn blizzard. She would have loved that. It was almost morning before they took her away. We changed airline reservations three times because the blizzard so impacted the schedules at the funeral home and the cemetery.

Which was not a bad thing.

Nanny had asked me, sixteen months ago, to preach her funeral. I had been thinking about it since. For sixteen months. And I had yet to write a word.

Granted, procrastination is one of my hobbies. But sixteen months? You'd think that with that amount of time I'd have come up with something. But I didn't. I couldn't. I could not even begin to write a eulogy for someone who was not dead. Every cell in my body screamed No! each time I tried. So I gave up. I knew when the time came and I was under a deadline I could do it. At least that was my hope.

So on Saturday I hunkered down at [local chain coffee shop that's not Starbucks] and wrote. On Sunday we flew out.

On Monday, we met with the hospice chaplain to go over the service. Nanny had fallen in love with her hospice caregivers and wanted the chaplain to have a part.

On Tuesday, we had a private visitation at the funeral home. Granddaddy insisted that he had to see her one last time before we buried her. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done.

I've always hated the funeral home visitation cliche "doesn't she look gooood?" but in Nanny's case it was true. She had withered to nearly nothing but she looked so much better than the last time I had seen her, two weeks before. Then, when she was lying in her bed, I hugged her and kissed her forehead and told her, "I'll see you again." She smiled at me and said "I know." I knew I would never see her again in this life, and she did, too. It was such an easier goodbye than the one sixteen months before. None of us knew how much time she had left then and it was painful and emotional. Two weeks ago, it had been hopeful. Tuesday it was painful again.

It was a large room with just a few of us - Granddaddy, Aunt Becky, Aunt Sandra, Uncle Connie, Joan, the kids, and me. Some of us had brought things to place in her casket and I took mine up just before we left. I lost sight of the hopefulness I'd felt two weeks earlier. A measure of finality overwhelmed me as I touched her bony arm; her cold cheek.

Wednesday was a brisk day, sunny, but breezy. She'd requested a simple graveside service, which is about all that's allowed at the national cemetery where we buried her (Granddaddy is a veteran). We lined up our cars at a staging area, awaiting instructions from the cemetery staff. When our time came, we were lead to a small chapel, open on one side, with only six or eight chairs. A good many friends of Aunt Becky and Sandra, the hospice staff, and some friends Nanny had made during her short stay in Colorado were there. I was really anxious about speaking because of the difficulty of the viewing, but I made it fine. The hard work had been done in the coffee shop, on the plane, and in Aunt Becky's home office on the computer.

I shared a little of who Nanny was, read some of her favorite scriptures, and addressed each of us as a family. I felt it important to give us all permission to grieve. I'm convinced we have Egyptian blood in us because we're all experts on denial (de-Nile, get it?) and I wanted to address that. Also, Nanny was not perfect. She said and did things that hurt us and we said and did things that hurt her and I wanted to acknowledge that. I closed with one of her favorite poems, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost, and the hospice chaplain prayed.

Later, we went to find her grave, which I almost wish we hadn't. The cemetery had done maybe twenty funerals that day, all in one section, with no sod, no marker, nothing but red dirt. Place, though, is important to me, and I've seen the grave, I know where it is, and if I never make it there again I have no regrets.

Godspeed, Nanny. I'll see you again.

Between two pastures

Nanny, feeling cramped last Thursday in her basement apartment, suggested we go outside and see the animals.

Aunt Sandra got the golf cart and drove her to the barn. One of the livestock was way over her species' gestational average and they had been concerned about her. She was huge and uncomfortable, but spirits were high as she showed signs of the birth's imminence: restlessness, raised tail, wandering in circles. When she pulled away from the herd and headed for the privacy of the upper pasture, we were sure she was about to deliver.

We had been out for a good half-hour in the blazing sun, but Nanny insisted on following the mother-to-be. I escorted her, hand at her elbow, along the fence line between the pastures to a front row seat for the big occasion, though there was no seat. I asked Nanny if she was ready to go back inside. No, I want to see the baby come.

So we waited. Gradually, a glistening, spindly leg appeared, with a snout not far behind. Granddaddy was chomping at the bit to help the mother, but Nanny yelled at him to leave her be. I could tell he was tiring of being ordered around, even by a sick, weak wife, but he stood firm between the mother and her pasture-mates who had wandered into her delivery area.

Then, as another leg appeared, the mother squatted down and with a tremendous push got the baby halfway out, his wet head soaking up its first rays of sunshine there between heaven and earth. Another squat, another push, and the baby landed in a heap at the mother's hind feet. Her ordeal was over.

Nanny was enthralled, relieved for the success of the new mother and proud of her own baby's confidence as Aunt Becky rushed in with a towel and began drying off the newborn. Aunt Becky and Granddaddy stood guard as the baby struggled to find his legs. Time and again, he would get his front legs under him and be almost up on his back legs, being nudged by mama, but either his coordination or his strength failed him and he crumpled back into a tumbleweed on the high plains floor.

Suddenly, Nanny swooned at my side. She'd been standing in the hot sun for some time, her first foray into the wild in several days, and her strength was sapped. Her stomach protruded in front of her as she tried to relieve her aching back. Oh sugar, she said to me, I should never have come out here.

I grabbed her right arm to steady her, shocked by its clammy thinness. She grabbed the top of the fence on the other side, and we shuffled back toward the barn.

We were passed in short order by Aunt Becky, who, concerned that the sun was too intense for the baby, had scooped him up and headed for the shade of the barn. And there I stood, flanked between an eighty-year-old woman in the grip of a terminal illness and a newborn creature not fifteen minutes old. Neither of them seemed to have mastery over their musculature. Both of them relied on the strength of others to protect them from the elements and get them to the safety of the barn. One had just been introduced to the pasture and his new home while the other was making one of her final visits as precious time slipped away. One was on a fast track to growth and development, while the other was on a fast track to atrophy and confinement.

Aunt Becky, the new baby, Nanny, the cycle of life, and me, slow-waltzing between two pastures.

Nanny

One Sunday in late May, I was on my way to worship, alone - Joan was on a writing retreat with some friends, and Evan and Lora spent the weekend with my parents. I received a cell phone call from Aunt Becky, informing me that Nanny been rushed to the hospital in the night with a severe bleeding problem. Joan was to return from her retreat that afternoon from the airport that serves Aunt Becky's community, and she immediately changed her flight to check on my grandmother.

A phone call from Joan later in the afternoon confirmed our worst fears. Nanny had undergone emergency surgery to patch a blood clot in her chest cavity, as well as cauterizing an ulcer, and that recurring problems with her liver weren't helping matters. I met my parents with a heavy heart to pick up the kids. I would have to explain to the kids Nanny's situation as I told them why mama wasn't coming home as expected. It was a tough night.

But Nanny pulled through, and a week later she was back home in the apartment in Aunt Becky's house that she shares with Granddaddy, her husband of sixty-three years. Nanny slowly improved, and last Wednesday week I booked a plane ticket out out west for mid-July to spend some time with them all.

Then Aunt Sandra called last Friday week.

Nanny's internist called her in to reveal results from earlier testing. After giving her the results, he sent her home to "get her affairs in order," which is 21st century medical euphemism for "your condition is terminal, and we've done all that we can do."

Aunts Becky and Sandra were understandably devastated. As were we, 1800 miles away. Joan and I broke the news to the children and spent the next several nights crying and praying Lora to sleep. Evan slipped into a quiet funk. Joan began planning for the inevitable, a bit morbidly premature perhaps, but that's how she copes. I, on the other hand, was my usual cool self in a crisis, slowing to a glacial pace of life. I did have enough synapses firing, though, to realize that sticking with my planned visit in mid-July just might be too late.

So I flew out last Wednesday.

I wasn't quite prepared for what I encountered. Nanny had gone down considerably since I left her last November. She is so frail, and forgetful, and weak. She is already a shell of the woman I knew as grandmother.

She has been diagnosed with non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver, caused by hepatitis-C she picked up on a mission trip probably thirty years ago. She will slowly bleed to death.

To talk with her and Grandaddy is to wrestle with paradoxes. At times they are at peace with her passing, yet at times grasping for hoped healing. At times they are complimentary of her doctors, yet at times angry at them for undiagnosing her problem for so long and mis-medicating her. At times they are grateful for the phone calls from friends who have been informed of her condition, yet at times they bristle at the intrusions and displays of "premature" grief. At times they brag on the care Aunts Becky and Sandra give them, yet at times they complain about their lack of privacy.

At times Nanny reverted to her benevolent-controlling ways, yet at times she couldn't remember who she had just spoken with on the phone, or wanted to argue about whether she had taken her medicine. At times she giggled like a schoolgirl at her clumsiness and forgetfulness, yet at times she despaired as she struggled to remember a friend's name.

I was a paradox as well, oscillating from being frustrated at hearing the same stories for the hundredth time to being melancholy over her dementia. At times I was ready to return home to my world and its challenges until I realized that once I left that place and time it would be lost to me forever.

It would take a lifetime to explain to you what an impact Nanny and Granddaddy, Aunt Becky, and Aunt Sandra have had on my life, both positively and negatively. Neither aunt has children. I am the first-born grandson and the only one that is still in contact with them. Neither can I express the relief I felt walking into the house last Wednesday to find Nanny still alive. I had made it. On time. I got four good days with her. She may not remember them, but I will. I hope to get back to see her again before she goes, but if I don't, I know that I did my best, I did what I needed to do, I said my good-bye, and I will see her on the other side someday. I pray that I will mean to someone what she means to me.

Happy Independence Day, Nanny.

Tombstone, Alabama

Aunt Becky was blessed with some unseasonably warm weather for her weekend visit. As well as some rain. She enjoyed listening to the rainfall Sunday night. Apparently it doesn't rain much out west where she lives.

She had told me a couple of weeks ago that she wanted to drive up to our hometown and see how things had changed. I don't get up there much anymore so it sounded like a good idea to me. I asked her what she wanted to see, mentally mapping out the most efficient tour route of schools we'd attended, businesses we'd patronized, and houses we'd lived in or visited the kinfolks in. She predictably named a few of them before mentioning one specifically.

Will you take me to see Mammy?

Mammy. Wow. I hadn't been to see her in several years. Mammy was Aunt Becky's grandmother; my great-grandmother. She was a sweet thing, and I feel robbed that I didn't know her in her prime. She was stricken with Parkinson's disease shortly after I was born; my memories consist of her shuffling along behind an aluminum walker and her sitting cross-legged in a big naugahyde chair wearing a cotton house dress with her thumbs and forefingers clacking together uncontrollably like an ambidextrous telegraph operator. She died over twenty years ago, during my first semester of college. On the day of her funeral I left the college bookstore after spending the astronomical sum of $180 buying textbooks to find a parking ticket on my windshield for having my back bumper hanging over a yellow curb in one of those welcome-to-the-real-world-you-ain't-in-high-school-no-more cosmic coincidences.

Yes, I'll take you to see Mammy, I replied. But that wasn't all. She wanted to see where Mammy's sisters were buried, so I agreed to take her there. And then she wanted to see where her father's (my grandfather's) folks are buried, and I agreed to take her there. And to the schools. And to the businesses. And to the houses.

It was quite a list but I thought it through and had a pretty good route picked out. There were a couple of shortcomings with my plan, however. First, it would take a good bit of time and miles to fit it all in. Second, Joan, Evan, and Lora wanted to go as well.

I wasn't worried about Joan. She has proven time and again that she will follow me anywhere. Lora was a natural concern simply because her age, attention span, and bladder capacity are all in the single digits. Evan was a concern because, well, because he's Evan.

Evan and I often clash during those teachable moments between a father and a son. If I explicitly try to impart some knowledge to him about something, he sometimes rebels with exasperated huffs and eye-rolls. He told me the last time we were at Vulcan Park as I pointed out the cooling towers of Miller Steam Plant on the horizon, Please, dad, no more geography! Being cooped up in a van with him for a couple of hours of intermittent cemetery stops didn't sound like the best possible Saturday, but for Aunt Becky's sake I determined that if I could handle it, he could too.

We quickly checked the first two cemeteries off our list. Cemetery #1 is where Mammy's sisters, their husbands, and some of their kids are buried. We tried to recall whose funerals we had attended and whose we hadn't and why. Our people buried in cemetery #2 died way before we were gleams in anyone's eyes, but I had discovered the graves during genealogical research some years back and thought Aunt Becky would be interested. Back on the road, we did the school, business, house portion of the tour before stopping for a bite to eat to fortify ourselves for cemetery #3.

I drove right to Mammy's grave as if I visit it every day. It was just as I remembered. Mammy and Papa, her husband (my great-grandfather), are buried between a dogwood tree and a white pine on a downslope near the edge of the cemetery. Mammy's mother, Mama R, is buried beside her. Mama R died when I was in first grade; her funeral is the first one I remember.

Evan soon wandered off as we stood in reflective silence over the graves. After a while he called me to come check out a soldier's grave marker he had found. Then, he found the grave of someone born in the 1800's, and then someone who lived into their nineties, and then someone with a familiar name. He began to connect husband's graves with those of their wives and then their children. I showed him the grave of a congressman's wife and then a grouping of Jewish merchant's graves, clustered together on a hillside in much the same order as their stores were arranged on Main Street. I showed him the grave of one of my neighbors growing up whose daughter he knows. Suddenly and inexplicably, in between simple stones and ostentatious monuments, the past connected with the present for Evan, and it was almost all I could do to get him back into the car so we could make the remainder of our stops before dark.

We drove past Mammy and Papa's old house and Mama R's last residence on our way to cemetery #4. I found my great-great-grandfather's grave, and I remembered a story my grandfather told me about how they loaded his grandfather into a wagon after he died to take him to the highway because the ambulance wouldn't come to the farm to get him. It was so cold they had to build a fire to thaw the ground enough to dig his grave, so cold was the winter of '32 in Alabama. As I passed the story to Evan, it began to rain.

It was an emotional day, for me and Aunt Becky more than the others; for Aunt Becky most of all. After all, she was 1,800 miles away from home and didn't know when she might pass this way again. I was glad I could share it with her, and I was glad that Evan felt a spark of interest for something that I didn't prompt. I hope he never forgets the day we toured the cemeteries with his great-Aunt Becky. I know I won't.

And yes, Mammy, we still miss you.

Not my bag

We made a roadtrip to Atlanta today to pick up my Aunt Becky who is visiting from out west.

Aunt Becky doesn't get back this way very often anymore, but she has a professional association meeting in Atlanta next week and she flew in early to spend a long weekend with her favorite nephew and his fam. We were all too happy to meet her at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

It isn't every day that I jump at the chance to go to Atlanta. Atlanta is high on my "been there, done that" list. I mean, one traffic jam on I-285 looks like another, and once you've driven down one street with Peachtree embedded in the name you've driven down them all. To me, the only saving grace to the whole city is their mass transit system, known as MARTA.

As soon as I heard about Aunt Becky's trip I immediately began to contemplate the stress-free journey from the Hamilton E. Holmes station (W5) to the Airport station (S7) with no traffic, parking, or other concerns inherent to our culture's obsession with all things automotive. We left our modest suburban driveway a little before 7:00 a.m., and two hours later we were standing in the drafty Holmes terminal, trying to get the token machine to work.

Now, I had already figured out our fare requirements for the day. Lora, being four, could ride for free, which meant that we need three tokens to get to the airport (me, Joan, and Evan) and four to get back (us + Aunt Becky). At $1.75 per, I needed $12.25 to by the seven tokens. I had a twenty, a ten, and a couple of ones in my wallet, and of course, no machine in the building would take my ten. Which meant I had to use my twenty, which meant I purchased four tokens more than I needed. And that griped me. What am I going to do with four extra MARTA tokens? I mentally screamed at the machine(s). Thanks for nothing!

But my private rant notwithstanding, Joan, Evan, Lora, and I boarded the train and were soon locomoting through the Atlanta cityscape. Five stops to the Five Points station, a transfer to the southbound train, and seven stops and an escalator ride later we were waving across Delta's baggage claim concourse to Aunt Becky, who had just arrived and retrieved her bags from carousel 5.

Joan grabbed Aunt Becky's backpack, Evan grabbed her small carry-on, I grabbed her large rolling suitcase, and Lora grabbed her hand and we all traipsed back to the MARTA station. We were in the airport terminal maybe ten minutes, max. Northbound train to Five Points, transfer to the westbound train, and five stops later we were wheeling luggage toward the exit in anticipation of pointing the chariot back to the Magic City.

I was about to hoist the big bag chest-high so I could maneuver through the exit turnstile when Aunt Becky uttered some pretty ominous words. You know, I don't think that's my bag. I screeched to a halt before the turnstile and did a did-you-say-what-I-think-you-said 180 degree turn. I sat the bag upright on its wheels and I noticed for the very first time a small white tag containing the name and address of the bag's owner, which unfortunately did not match the name of my Aunt Becky. We had someone else's bag.

I can tell you that all kinds of questions go through your mind when you are standing at an exit turnstile holding someone else's bag, such as:
1. Is there something illegal in this bag that's gonna land my careless, didn't-verify-the-claim-check butt in the Fulton County Jail?
2. Has [unfortunate owner of bag] already left on his/her flight to Brazil for a month-long Amazon expedition without their life-saving supply of insulin?
3. You mean I'm gonna have to ride the train all the way to the airport and back before I can get to Cracker Barrel for lunch?
4. Is that why neither token machine would take my ten and I had to buy four extra tokens?

The answers to those questions are:
1. I don't know
2. I don't know
3. Yes
4. Yes

So off we went. Again. Five stops to the Five Points station, a transfer to the southbound train, and seven stops and an escalator ride. I began to feel like a MARTA regular. I actually thought at one point, man, we're at Oakland City already? We dropped off [unfortunate owner]'s bag at the baggage service counter and backtracked to carousel 5 to find Aunt Becky's bag still traveling around in circles.

I kinda know how the bag felt.

Welcome back to Birmingham, Aunt Becky.