grief – Almost Farmgirl

I think the season might have changed from spring to summer while I wasn’t looking. A quiet breath of change that happened maybe while I was grading. Or shearing. Or mourning.

Collectively, a lot of us are mourning right now. Lives lost to COVID. Lives lost to violence. Lost experiences. Lost sense of normalcy. The world, I think, is undergoing some changes, and it can be hard to keep up or know quite where you fit.

I’m feeling all of that.

I set out at the beginning of quarantine with grand intentions to write more, but I’ve struggled with it. The more you don’t write, the harder it is to get back in the habit; it’s a skill that must be practiced as much (maybe more) than it is a talent. Early on, it was the chaos of online teaching that made me feel stuck. I only had so much brain space, and it didn’t seem I could fit much else in beyond my classroom. Then it was loss and depression and anxiety. Personal and collective.

We’re all going through a collective experience of trauma right now. Several of them really. Some people are handling it better than others, I think. Some people are really struggling. Some people don’t quite know what to feel.

Suddenly, and collectively, we’ve come to the ever present but often ignored conclusion that our lives are very often out of our control.

Beyond our collective grief and mourning, my family has experienced personal loss. My grandpa passed away this spring, an illness or injury that it seemed like the doctors couldn’t quite pin down took him from us. Thanks to the virus, most of us didn’t really get to say goodbye. We texted and called. We posted memories and remembrances on social media. We even had a collective ice cream social on Zoom. (If you knew my grandpa, you know that he loved ice cream.)

Grandpa with the signature smile. He’s wearing that smile in nearly all my memories of him.

We didn’t get to hug him or each other, though. We didn’t get to have a wake or a funeral.

I’m sure I’m not the only member of the family who felt depression hang over me like a shadow as he faded from us. The virus creates loss without context. An emptiness that just seems to appear in front of you like a fall into Wonderland through a rabbit hole.

(Hmmm…I think grandpa would like that analogy; he was a nationally known rabbit breeder, and it seems very likely to me that he would have been pretty comfortable with his gateway to the afterlife taking the shape of a rabbit hole or maybe a path through a rabbit coop full of his favorite Flemish Giants.)

My depression had been waiting in the wings since the start of the virus, and it poured onto center stage following on the heels of our loss. It does that. Comes and goes, but never really goes. It was my companion for a few weeks, a welling up inside me that occasionally rose to prominence and took over. I was thankful for my support system. For my friends who called or texted to check in. For family, who knew my loss by feel because it had spread across their skin and hearts as well. For my guy, who didn’t have the words (because, believe me, no one ever does) but who wrapped me up in his arms and told me he would be right there as long as I needed him, who let me cry on his shoulder and brought me pizza when food had lost a lot of its appeal.

A photo from Grandma’s 90th birthday this year. John, Grandpa, Grandma, and Me. I love this photo.

I’ve read that grief is love that has no where to go, that that’s why we should let people have their grief, to ride through the rough terrain of loss rather than try to smooth it over for them with platitudes. You have to learn to ride through the rough road carrying the love with you; no one can navigate the holy pain of loss in your stead.

One of my aunts wrote a touching tribute to grandpa a few days before his death, when we all knew it was coming and felt ourselves waiting for the hand of the creator to deliver him from his intense pain. She wrote about all the things she would miss. All the ways she would miss him.

I somehow didn’t see her reflection until a few days after he passed. I had spent the in between thinking about all the things I would miss as well.

One line she wrote, “I will miss the way you measured time by season and weather, the way any farmer does,” bounced around in my chest, filling space in an empty spot that I hadn’t known was there.

I do that too…

My grandfather left an obvious legacy. He and my grandmother raised nine children on a farm along the rock river. Those children, in turn, raised their children in their own way–some on farms of their own; some, like mine, in town in a small house with a white picket fence–but all of us have a little plow dirt in our blood I think, some more obviously than others. Most of us have a dose of Midwestern common sense. Many of us know the magic of being rooted, connected to the growth of things in a very visceral way. He quietly taught us that, I think.

Not long after he passed, the month of May surprised Central Illinois with a late frost. Dad came over and helped me cover my garden. We spread plastic sheets over green beans and put buckets upside down over tomatillos and tomatoes. I used actual blankets to tuck in my broccoli and slung Max’s first coat over my lettuce to protect it, as I had with him, from the cold. I thought about Grandpa a lot that night, wondering how many times he worked to protect the crops from a late frost, thought about the way he taught dad how to drive a tractor and plant corn in rows and the way Dad taught me.

The frost claimed no casualties in my garden, despite rolling over the ridge line low and fierce; it was protected by the knowledge that a family passes from one to the next.

It strikes me sometimes that he isn’t here anymore; that I won’t see him on Christmas Eve. That we won’t talk about my horses again; I won’t see him nod approvingly and tell me “that’s a fine looking horse” with the knowledge of a seasoned horseman when I pull out a photo of my latest project. I won’t hear him comment on the price of milk or this year’s corn crop or the weather. He won’t wrap me up in a bear hug that smells just a little like a barn. (His hugs would lift us off the ground until he was well into his 70s.)

I will miss him.

But I will think of him when I see the sun set over corn fields. When I start up a tractor. When I breathe in the scent of freshly plowed garden dirt. When I eat ice cream, like he did, with a fork.

I suspect that I will measure “time by season and weather” for the rest of my days, the same way he did through all of his.

I think it’s true that grief is love with no where to go. I’ve learned that the process of grieving teaches you where to put that love, how to share it, how to pull it out when you need to remember the ways it made you who you are.

Mom, Grandma, Grandpa, Dad, my sister, and me. (I’m the little one.)

I hope your grieving, however it looks now, teaches you more about love and reminds you how to be full.

me and nana

“Don’t let it be too long before you call again, honey.”

“I won’t. Love you, Nana. Have a good night.”

“Love you too, darlin.'”

We hadn’t talked very long. She was tired. She had been tired a lot lately. The past few years had seen her in and out of the hospital with more regularity. Last fall, she had given my sister and I each one of her gold rings.

“Just in case something happened,” she told us. “I just want you to have it.”

It’s tucked in my jewelry box now; I forgot to wear it to the funeral. And I waited too long to call.

<<<>>>

In the past six weeks, I have been at one deathbed. Two funerals.

Dressed in black and disconnected from what was in front of me.

Watching my aunt receive condolences on the death of her husband. Giving condolences that don’t feel deep or wide enough to communicate my sympathies.

Watching my sister collapse in tears on the side of my Nana’s casket. Fighting the urge to do the same.

One week earlier I had stood with my sister beside Nana’s bed. They were “keeping her comfortable” then, and I knew it was only a matter of time, but there was a little part of me hoping. She had rallied before, hadn’t she? Maybe, just maybe, she would rally again. Maybe, like before, I would hear her again, talking about how “that was a close one, honey.”

<<<>>>

Nana wasn’t my biological grandmother. She had been one of my mother’s closest friends, despite being old enough to be her mother. When my mom got married and had kids (my older sister and then myself), Nana moved in to help raise us. She lived with us until I was eleven.

Nana helped us with our homework. She cooked our birthday dinners. She was there for doctor appointments, school plays, t-ball games, holidays, vacations, chicken pox, every bout of the flu, riding lessons…everything. I cannot untangle my childhood from Nana.

I wouldn’t want to.

When I was about seven, she started using the family YMCA membership to walk the track in the early morning. I got it in my head that I would go with her. We would wake up at six am and walk the raised track. Me, seven years old with white-blonde, pony-tailed hair, wearing my swishy 90s track suit, power-walking with Nana and the other gray-haired retirees.

We usually went out for a donut afterwords.

Nana always included us if we wanted to be included. My sister and I would travel with her to visit her mother in Indianapolis whenever she went there. She showed me how to dead head petunias when I wanted to help in the garden. She let me help make egg noodles in the kitchen…until I stole too many, earned a slap on the wrist and a “Now, you just get out of here and let me finish!”

Once, she came along with me to see a new X-Men film…She was well into her 70s at the time with zero interest in superheros or comics, but she ate popcorn and sat beside me just because I wanted to go.

She taught me from the very beginning that family didn’t need to share blood.

<<<>>>

My sister and I stood on either side of her bed. It was a Saturday. She wasn’t conscious, but they told us she could hear us. So, we talked.

We said thank you. We sang “Bushel and a Peck” the way we used to when we were little.

I don’t think I actually said goodbye. I didn’t want to. I just said thank you, and I love you. And then I thought it–thank you, I love you–when the words stopped coming.

<<<>>>

This winter, I visited her in the hospital with John. She hadn’t met him before, but she knew his name when he came in with me. I was surprised; I hadn’t been hearing good things about her memory.

She sat in her hospital chair, connected to wires and drips and oxygen, and she looked him up and down with an eagle eye.

“You’re a good looking man,” she proclaimed.

“Well, thank you, Nana.” he replied.

We sat with her and visited for a few hours. She never lost track of who I was, or who John was, but she kept losing her place, asking when her daughter would be home, wondering where the dog was.

When John left to go to the bathroom, she informed me that she would “kick his ass” if he ever hurt me. Then she asked if we were going to get married. Then she told me that she would kick my ex-husband’s ass if she could just get a hold of him.

<<<>>>

My sister called me on Monday morning. Nana was gone.

My dad had stopped my house that morning, and I collapsed against him, sobbing. He stayed until I steadied. I walked into the house, sat on my kitchen floor, and listened to Doris Day sing “A Bushel and A Peck” on repeat.

What do you do when part of your world disappears? When the sun has the audacity to keep shining as though a great light hadn’t gone out? How dare the universe keep expanding, the earth keep spinning, wind keep blowing? How is it that the flowers outside my window had bloomed that morning?

<<<>>>

Tuesday night, the flu hit me like a semi-truck, proof that viruses don’t give one single fuck what you’re going through emotionally.

Fever. Chills. Coughing. Sore throat. Headache.

My dad started watching the animals. I couldn’t get out of bed.

An old friend from high school reached out to me, asking me how I was. I told her that I was having a hard time processing, that I couldn’t quite make it past the physical fever to reach the emotional pain.

She understood. When her grandmother had died, she’d come down with a wretched case of shingles, lending her to that same feeling.

“It doesn’t really feel like she’s gone,” I told her.

“I know what you mean,” she replied. “Sometimes it feels like they took a trip and just can’t get a phone signal.”

<<<>>>

The morning of Nana’s funeral, I got a call from my nearest neighbor.

“Hi, Cherity. It’s Connie, from next door? I just…I think one of your llamas is dead. I mean, I know it’s dead. We can see it from the house. The vultures are after it. I wasn’t sure if you knew. I thought you’d want to know.”

Of course. Of course there’s a dead animal in my pasture. …This is how animal sanctuaries wind up getting animal control called on them.

I pulled on sweats and walked out to the back pasture along my neighbor’s property. It was the most I had moved in almost a week. Sure enough, a dead alpaca was laid out in the middle of the field. I got close enough to see the vultures. To realize that they had opened her up past her rib cage. I have a soft spot for vultures, and I didn’t blame them or harbor ill will. They were doing their job.

From where she was and what I know of llamas and alpacas, I’m guessing she went down quickly, probably a heart attack. From what I know of vultures, I’m guessing she had been there a day or two.

My dad and boyfriend both do a great job of taking care of everyone out here, but neither of them know the animals well enough to notice if one of them hasn’t been in. Between losing Nana and coming down with the flu, I had missed her absence.

<<<>>>

I went to the funeral, convinced I was getting better. Pastors stood at a pulpit and talked about a generic version of a woman who I loved deeply. It didn’t seem right.

I wanted to stand up and talk about the stories that made her laugh. I wanted to talk about the fried green tomatoes I still can’t quite make like she did. About the time she went up in a helicopter with me over the Badlands on vacation when I was little because I wouldn’t go up with anyone else. Stories and memories bubbled up within while they talked about how much she enjoyed Bible study and going to church. How she played baseball in high school. It seemed like they missed her to me, but maybe that was just to me.

<<<>>>

The next day, my abating flu was back with a vengeance. Six days later, I was diagnosed with pneumonia.

It’s getting better now. I’m moving slow, but recovering. Working in small doses. Taking it one day at a time.

I’m taking a lot of things one day at a time.

<<<>>>

I drank the last of my Greek Ouzo the night of the funeral, toasting to Nana. John and I watched Pixar’s “Coco.” I thought a lot about the memories we keep of the people and animals we love. I thought about the way they come with us as the world continues to turn. The way we wear their love in our bodies. Love is never wasted; it is handed off like a baton from one person to the next as we walk through our lives, not diminishing in the passing, but burning brighter as it moves from one to the next. The sun has the audacity to keep shining because, even though it might feel like it, the light we feel like we’re missing isn’t actually lost. It’s just been passed along.

Nana handed me a lot of love. It’s my job to make sure it burns bright.