For Adrianna
The phone rings.
“Hello?”
Although I can only hear one side of the conversation, I know it must be bad news on the other end of this brief dialogue. I could tell as soon as I saw my grandmother’s usually jovial face turn to one of grief and seriousness.
The tone shifts immediately from lighthearted family dinner banter to grace concern. As the conversation continues from one side of the telephone line, all eyes shift questioningly around the table.
“Okay… I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
The phone hits the receiver.
“Lois, we have to go to the hospital.”
Concern turns to dread. Frantically searching the faces of my family for some idea, some affirmation of what has just transpired. I don’t get anything back but quiet, glassy eyed looks of the same questions as I was hoping to find the answers to.
As my mother and grandmother abruptly leave the dinner table that had, just minutes before, been filled with laughter and enthusiastic chatter, and sullenly get together shoes and purses, and coats, and paperwork, I had a gut wrenching fear of what was happening.
It couldn’t be, could it? She can’t be dead… I couldn’t handle that. Not yet.
But what else could it be?
As the questions and emotions continue to flood through my mind. I quietly excuse myself from the table and feel my steps inadvertently quickening to the bathroom. Just as soon as the door closes behind me, the thoughts and emotions formerly flooding my mind began pouring out through my eyes. I accepted my own fears. She’s gone.
So this was it. That was the first time in my life that I had ever been affected by a death in the family. Although I had known of other family members that died, it was never anyone that I saw regularly or felt any particular bond with. Although we called her “Aunt Annie”, she was actually my great aunt Adrianna. She was a great aunt. Her child-like outlook kept her young, and we all knew and loved her for that.
Quite frankly, I didn’t know how to feel about this situation. I wasn’t sure that she had died, but at the same time, regardless of whether she did or not, this incident brought death into the forefront of my mind, at least for the moment. It was at this point that I really started thinking about life and death. Quality of life versus release of death. It is a delicate line that we, as human beings with feelings and memories and emotions, often jump back and forth over. She’s out of pain, but now she’s gone. She could have lived longer, but would she be happy? Would it matter to her? These are the kinds of questions I found myself asking and the types of themes I began to explore. This was just the beginning.
The front door squeaks as it opens, and I prepare myself for confirmation of the news I have already resolved myself to. In the blur of voices and sobs, all I heard; all I needed to hear was, “I had them pull the plug…It’s for the best. It’s what she wanted…” The rest of the day that had started out as normal and routine was now covered by a big black cloud of silence, tears, and avoided, empty glances.
“It’s for the best.”
“It’s what she wanted.”
As much as I believe these statements are more that likely true, it’s hard to accept the crushing weight of their impact on me. On us. Was this really for the best? Maybe she could have gotten better and returned to that dinner table to share more cheerful meals with us. I can’t even imagine how my grandmother must feel. Making such a huge decision that comes down to life changing for all of us, and life of death for my aunt, my grandmother’s closest sister. The pain this decisions must have caused her is incomprehensible. My grandmother is such a strong person. If anyone can handle this kind of a situation with a clear head and with someone else’s best interest in mind, without letting personal desires influence the decision, it’s her.
But on the other hand, how can anyone know for sure what’s best and what she wanted in this situation? Sure, there’s been times where she said that she wanted to die, but we all say things we don’t really mean in times of stress. And she really didn’t look good for the past few weeks, and has been getting progressively worse, but you never know... maybe she could have recovered. It’s also been scary how she has been seeing and hearing people and animals that weren’t there. I know they say that happens when a person is close to death, but maybe she was just having really intense and real-seeming dreams, or confusing sounds and sights of the hospital for things more familiar in her declining state… Or maybe I’m just trying to hold onto Aunt Annie as she once was; a fun, funny, loving woman. Always bringing laughs and warm feelings to the room.
On the other hand it’s also true that she was a lonely woman who lived alone, had never been married, had no children, and didn’t really have much of anyone else in her life aside from those of us who were sitting around that big, oak dinner table in the middle of a kitchen filled with lobe, memories, and now, sadness. Maybe she did really mean it when she said she wanted to die. Maybe there was a lot more to the story that the little snippets I overheard when they didn’t think I was listening. I’m sure my grandmother had good reason for deciding that it was time to let go the of closest sibling she had left, and the closest relative I had ever lost. At a time like this, who knows what’s best and what anyone wanted and what was the best decision. I guess that’s a question no one can ever get an answer to.
Ultimately, after debating these questions and more, I came to terms with the death of loved ones. In this situation, I felt that it was for the better, and that now my aunt can be happy and healthy in a place far better than Earth. Where before I didn’t think much about death at all, I now had a comforted feeling about it in this circumstance. It all just hit me one day. I was sitting in the car, coming home one night, looking up at the stars. All of the sudden, I just felt at peace with my aunt’s passing. I discovered that although death is sad for the living, the dead are smiling. No more pain, no more loneliness, no more unhappiness. At this point I truly began to believe that all things happen for a reason and that everyone has a particular time to go. It is still had to accept at first, but I can look up at the stars and remember those that have been lost and feel at ease. There is a certain beauty to death. There really is a light at the end of the tunnel.
I was never a religious person. Going through this experience opened me up to a sense of spirituality that I had never before given much though to. I was at an age where I could understand things better and contemplate the meaning of things much more complicated than I ever had to deal with before. Now, with the death of my aunt, I was in an introspective mode as it was, and given the subject matter, I began to switch my thoughts from life and death, to death and afterlife. It was at this point that I started to wonder about whether or not there was a God, and what the role of any higher power truly was. Today, I still am not sure what I feel about these questions, but I do believe that things happen for a reason, and that when someone dies, they do live on in some form of afterlife. Where or what that is, I don’t know, but the death of my aunt allowed me to begin to explore these ideas and feel a comfort in knowing that there are passed loved ones watching over me from a better place until it is my time to join them in eternal peace.
Walking into the funeral parlor, I no longer felt particularly sad about the death. I had resolved myself to what had happened in the past few days, and I had come to accept that she is in a better place. At this point, I just feel nervous. I’ve never been to a wake before, nevermind a wake for one of my top 3 favorite relatives. I stay back in the beginning, trying to build up the courage to go and face the remains of someone I had been so familiar with. It’s almost as if seeing her in the casket would cement that she will never again make a physical appearance at my grandparent’s dinner table. That we would no longer have anyone to give the stuffed animals won at the boardwalk to. That no one would take about their birthday or Christmas for at least a month in advance. That the memories would never be reiterated the same way, and that I would never again hear her voice or her little girlish giggle.
On my own, I couldn’t bear to go up to the casket and deal with all of this. After a while, my uncle took me by the hand, pulling me out of my own thoughts which I had been lost in up until I felt him touch my hand, and up to the front of the room. Of course he didn’t know my reservations about seeing my dear great aunt lying in a box of eternal rest, but since I hadn’t said a word since I got there, but I guess he felt obligated to accompany me, and before me, my brother, to say our final goodbyes. After that initial push to go up, my nervousness turned into a feeling of obligation. By this point, I didn’t feel that I needed to go up to the casket. I felt that whatever I felt I needed to say to or about my aunt, I could just say in my head, and she would hear me. I went up with my uncle anyway. The walk from the back of the small room up and around the far left side, past rows and rows of chairs waiting for mourners to rest and reminisce seemed like it took forever. When finally I arrived and kneeled in front of the person I knew was supposed to be my Aunt Annie, I saw someone I didn’t recognize. It vaguely resembled the person whom I had been missing in her seat, next to me at the end of the dinner table for the past few weeks, but it was not her. I couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong with the person I saw before me, but I attributed this confusing to emotions, nervousness, apprehension, and denial, and kneeled with my mind blank until my uncle saw it fit to get up and proceed back to my previous spot in the back of the room.
After this step was over, I felt relieved that I would not be expected to go up again, and if asked if I had paid my final respects, I could say yes. For the remainder of the time I was there, most was spent lost back in the whirling thoughts in my head, taking occasional breaks to see what was going on in the reality happening around me. During these times, I would catch clips of conversation, glimpses at the body being passed off, seemingly successfully, as that of my great aunt, and looking at the other people in the room, trying to read their reactions to the body in the casket. Finally, after what feels like a lifetime, the wake is over and people are filing out. As the doors closed to the room where my aunt lay, I realized that, symbolically, the casket had just been closed on the part of my life where I had a true innocence and naïveté regarding the death of a loved one.
Eventually I did realize what looked so wrong about my aunt that day, lying in her casket. It was all cosmetic. Her hair was done wrong, she always wore it with bangs covering her forehead. Whoever prepared her for the viewing combed her bangs back and off of her face. Also, she wasn’t wearing the necklace that we had given her years before. Although it said “#1 Aunt”, I always thought it looked like a dinosaur because of the big #1 and the smaller, vertically placed “aunt”. In life, she never took that necklace off. In death, this detail was overlooked. Today, that necklace lies safely in a box in my room, together with the memorial cards of loved ones since passed, and other relics of times gone by.
Upon realizing what it was that made my aunt seem so foreign in the casket, I got deeper into my spiritual reaction to death. I came to believe that in life, the body is a vehicle for the soul, the true personality underneath. In death, the body is unnecessary, and completely irrelevant. Although still, to this day, I don’t know where I think people go when they die, I still feel that I can take comfort in knowing that they are watching over me. When something reminds me of my aunt- a sound, a smell, a song, a toy, a memory, I smile. Whenever I am confronted with one of these things, or have a strange feeling of the presence of dead loved ones, I always take the time to say hello in my heart and in my mind, and with that, I feel comforted, and know that although they are gone in the physical body, they will be with me always in spirit. It is still sad when someone close to me dies, but now I know that they will be okay and that they will come to visit me when the time is right. Although the physical body may be deceased, the soul will move on, and the spirit is still full of life, and that, I believe, is the beauty in the face of death.
