The Matriarch

It’s a funny thing about death. Dying affords the dead more respect than at any other time in their lives. I don’t understand why that’s true, but I know it is. We haven’t had a family Christmas that garnered every member of the family’s presence for several years. And our Brady Bunch gang can’t set aside their individual lives to honor our parents’ wedding anniversary, even though we all stood up for the blessed event. Nobody’s birthday is important enough to command attendance by all. But when funeral arrangements for a matriarch are made, children and grandchildren and great grandchildren rearrange their schedules to be in the little church where the parents and a daughter were married, where other beloved family members were honored in death, and where we have spent so many Sunday mornings, Christmas Eves, and Easter mornings.

Miss Blanche, as the pastor insisted on calling my grandmother throughout the memorial, died in her sleep at the hospital only days before she was scheduled to move into an assisted living facility. I don’t believe she wanted to live that way, and if you push me on the matter, I will tell you that I believe she willed herself to die. She was a strong and independent woman whose health and balance was failing. She couldn’t live at home anymore, at 86. Truthfully, I think she lived an ideal life. It’s not that it was a perfect life, a pain-free life, but it was a full life. And she had what most of us pray for in her passing; that age old wish for a quiet dying in our sleep. (As an aside, I’ve always thought my luck at never being in a hospital is going to bring me a horrible death where limbs and maybe even a head get ripped off).

The last time I saw my grandmother, she was in the hospital recovering from a blood infection and pneumonia. She had fallen and hurt her leg prior to the hospitalization, too. Her door was closed when I arrived, so I knocked lightly. A nurse answered, “yes” as though I should I come in. The sight that greeted me is one I could live without. They had changed her bed, and were in the process of getting her back in bed. My gram was not a large lady, but her muscles were weak and she was of no help in maneuvering her frame at that point. Because of this, the nurses employed a hammock type lift to move and hold her while they remade the bed. As they swung the hammock on a crane (as it were), she wailed like a child with every movement. I don’t know what was causing her pain, but I wished the nurse would have answered, ‘We just need a minute’ to my tapping at the door.

I busied myself looking at the flowers and photos that other family had left for her during the awkward lapse of time that it took to situate her. After they settled her into her bed again, they told her she had a visitor. She was immediately happy to see me and I was grateful she knew who I was, for I had been warned that she was quite dehydrated and “out of it” and may not welcome me. Her voice was scarce, teeth removed, and conversing was difficult at best. But we did manage a coherent conversation in snippet phases. She was worried about her cats and knew I would sympathize with that. I tried to be reassuring and calming since she seemed so out of her element there, but as I looked at her scrawny shoulders and sunken face, I marveled at how it seemed like I didn’t even know this woman. She looked so unlike herself! Her demeanor was not that of the brash, almost cranky woman I’ve come to know. So strange to see her this way…

She was tired and needed to rest, but I guess somewhere in her clouded thoughts she did not want to be rude. She finally looked at me with big doe eyes and blurted, “You need to get to bed now!” I stifled a giggle, and managed an only slightly amused look on my face. “Oh! Okay." I said with a tickle. I leaned in and kissed her cheek, told her to listen to the doctors, and said that I’d be in to see her again later in the week. As fate would have it, I caught a cold and didn’t want to visit her while ill so that was the last time I saw her.

However, I think my gram would be pleased (was pleased!) to know that her passing brought every last one of her immediate family to one place to say goodbye to her. I mentally checked off the list of star alignments and worlds that had to collide to force this unprecedented event. The roll call was impressive. The wayward child who left his family in the lurch and watched his own parents take care of them was present, for what I assume was a desire to try to make peace with his mother. The granddaughter who lost both of her own parents too early in life hopped a jet to prove that there is some shred of her heart left where her mother’s mother still matters. The grandchildren she took in at different times for different reasons came to shed a tear for the best part of a family that they’ve ever known. The three loyal grandsons, the step-grandchildren, the nieces, and the favorite son who hadn’t slept all week in the terror of laying his mother to rest—all of them were present for the final goodbye to the woman who was the glue of the family for so many years.

And while the occasion was somber, I still found my overwhelming emotion to be that of wonder. I watched the people I’ve prayed with, laughed with, fought with, and called “family” for the last two decades carry themselves through this event in their own ways. I sat pensively in the front row of the church as the congregation was dismissed from the back to the front to pay its individual last respects to the white-haired woman lain out before us. To explain the strange configurations of our family is daunting. The nieces who claimed my stepfather as their guardian growing up, the man who is their half-brother who called his grandmother “Ma” and the cousins who lived without the father, lost their mother, and leaned further on their father’s mother in their time of need: these are just a few of the results of fate and the crazy world in which we live. It’s confusing, I know. Watching each family pass through for a final goodbye was heartbreaking, yes, but also incredibly wondrous. Six degrees of separation… our family has certainly broken approximately 180 degrees of separation. I can’t say how we all came to be a family, but I know its casting director had to think a lot harder about this conglomeration than he did about the Brady Bunch.

The mother and grandmother, friend and aunt was at rest. The family was in angst. All showed up. All made the effort to be kind to one another. That’s no small feat in my family. Death commands the attention, if only for a moment, of even the hardest hearts. Rest in peace, Gram…we will miss you.