It’s been seven years since you left us.
Well, seven years since you died. You left us six months before you died.
I remember the day clearly, because we were coming up on my firstborn’s birthday, and I got the call right when we were taking him out of the bath. Mom said you’d had a bad fall, that you’d bled yourself to death while nurses and doctors watched, or didn’t watch, maybe. They gave you so much blood to make up for the losing, enough blood for a whole new body.
You died on the table. And they brought you back. Except you didn’t get a new body. You just got your old one, now ruined.
That’s what did it. That’s what beckoned your dying.
Because it wasn’t really you they brought back. It was a smaller version of you. A you who couldn’t walk, a you who couldn’t talk, a you who lay shrunken in a hospital bed with an oxygen mask over your face for the times you forgot how to breathe.
And what kind of life is that?
I remember the first time I saw you after that fall. I took the day off, drove all the way to Houston, all the way to a hospital I never wanted to visit, and then I walked in, holding the hand of my almost-1-year-old. And while he played in the waiting room where all the family members smiled over how cute and smart and aware he was, I went inside a room that smelled like death and held your hand instead. You looked at me. I looked at you. I cried. You cried. I prayed, out loud where you could hear, and you made noises, like you understood, like you agreed with the words I called down from heaven.
I leaned down close. “You’re going to make it, Memaw,” I said.
“Yes,” you said.
“You’re going to try?”
“Yes,” you said.
I swear you talked. I will swear it forever, even if the doctors say there’s no physical way you could have spoken any words, because you were frozen inside your body. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t say any words after that. It didn’t matter that it was not medically possible.
I knew the possibility of miracle. I’d heard it. And I believed it. You would get better. You would.
Except all those days passed and you didn’t get better. No one tried to figure it out, just accepted it as fact, just chalked it up to another victim of stroke and blood loss and all those things that can take a life while we aren’t looking.
We weren’t looking. Or at least I wasn’t.
Sure, we knew it could happen, because it’s what took your mother, too. But so soon? So young? So fast?
Doctors urged you to change your eating ways. Reduce your cholesterol. Eat fewer hamburgers fried up at 11 p.m. when you finished that challenging crossword puzzle and discovered you were hungry because you’d worked right through dinner. Get rid of the chocolate covered raisins you kept in the green jar beside your dining room table.
But you were always so stubborn. So resilient. So focused and determined and right.
So of course you kept your eating ways. And who can you blame you? You lived out your last days in pleasure. At least there is that.
It’s just that I wish you were here. I wish you could have seen that little boy you only got to hold once while you were well. I wish you could have seen the look on his face when his baby brother came home from the hospital and he threw the most epic tantrum in the history of tantrums because he didn’t want another baby in the house. I know what you would have done. You would have pulled him into your arms and held him until he stopped crying. I know because it’s what you did to me, all my life, even when I was too big for a lap. You would hold me with words, then.
I wish you would have been around to see number 3 and the twins and this last one. You would have been as shocked by the large family I decided to have as I am myself.
“Rachel,” you would have said. “Who would ever have thought?” And then you would have smiled at them all, and your eyes. It was always your eyes that spoke the most. They would have said, Love. Proud. Joy.
It was on the way home from a worship retreat in New Mexico when Mom called to say you’d passed peacefully. I cried the rest of those 643 miles home. Every time I looked out at the dunes and thought about how you would have loved to hear the little boy singing in the back seat. Every time I saw a fast-food chicken place and thought of Hartz, your favorite. Every time I saw the color purple.
Your funeral was two days before Valentine’s Day, a celebration of a life well lived, even in the midst of heartache and sorrow and so much disappointment. There was a failed marriage and the single life thereafter, and there was a lifelong career crunching numbers at the local school district. There were coworkers who cried and family who cried, and you couldn’t really tell who was who, because they were all family to you. They all knew you the same. They all called you stubborn and immovable but also kind and generous.
A cousin shared about how much she would miss you. We listened to your favorite hymn. Your grandson-in-law read a poem I’d written about your purple slippers and candy jars and books of crossword puzzles stacked in the corner of a dining room. And then we all gathered to eat casseroles and fried chicken and mashed potatoes covered in southern gravy.
You would have loved it, I think.
They say years heal wounds. But it’s not so much that they heal those wounds as they make them easier to bear. Because now, even after seven years, there is still a giant hole where you used to be. I know because last year, as we crept up to what would have been your 80th birthday, right at the tail end of summer, I found my throat tightening. Still. After all these years. Thinking about how we’d thrown that 80th birthday party for your mother and it was like a giant family reunion with everyone showing up we hadn’t seen in years and years and years, even though Nana was confined to a wheelchair and lobbed a lopsided smile at everyone and hardly knew who was who.
I know because this year we’ve been creeping up on your 81st, and I’ve found myself missing you when I look at my oldest and wish I could tell you what he says he wants to be when he grows up and about the handwritten books he leaves lying around everywhere and the way he talks about his future, so we could laugh about how he’s just like me. Missing you when I look at the second boy and think about how you might have exclaimed over those brilliant blue eyes that haven’t been seen in our family for a while. Missing you when I look at the third one and see your eyes and smile and the stubborn will you passed along without even knowing it.
Missing you when I think about how we used to talk.
But what I miss most are all the little things. The way you’d argue that Vince Gill was the greatest country singer in the world, but Garth Brooks was a fake, and how I hardly knew what you were talking about because I didn’t listen to country music. How you’d beat an argument to death because you knew what you thought, and no one was going to change your mind. The way you’d laugh until the sound just disappeared and then you would shake the laughter out of your eyes and we all worried you’d pass out.
I miss those nights playing Trivial Pursuit around a raucous table that me and my brother and sister and cousins weren’t invited to, as persistently as we asked, how you’d argue over those answers, because everyone wanted to win, how we’d laugh just to watch.
The sound of the news you’d watch every evening at 6, without fail, and the way you’d curse the remote when you accidentally switched the channel and couldn’t figure out how to get it back.
I miss your wrinkled hand in mine. I miss those brown eyes so full of laughter and love and the smile that could set the whole world right again. I miss your notes, written on yellow paper in all caps, because that’s how you liked it. I miss your e-mails. I miss talking. I miss just sitting, you pulling out the local newspaper, me pulling out the latest Victoria Holt novel I’d found at the library.
I miss who you were to me. I miss who I was to you.
My memories with you are filled with bright yellow, and some of them are piercing blue, and others are foggy gray, but in and out and through the years there is something that was woven undoubtedly into all the days and hours and minutes.
Love.
You loved like it was all that mattered in life. You taught us how to love like that, too.
Thank you.
I wish you could have seen this.
I wish I could have asked you what you might have done.
I wish you could have read this thing I wrote.
I wish you could have met him. Known him. Loved him.
I wish my boys could know you. I wish they could learn from you. I wish they could be held by you as I was held by you.
But you live on.
Every now and then, when my boys are looking through the photo albums that line the top of our bookshelves, they’ll see a picture of you (not enough of them, of course. But who ever knows the day you won’t be around to fill albums?). “Tell me about Memaw,” they’ll say, and the first thing I say, every time, is, “You would have loved her.”
Because most people did.
And then they’ll settle in, snuggling closer, because they know a story’s coming. And they know it’s a good one.
You live on in these stories.
I miss you. Happy birthday. We’ll have a hell of a celebration when I see you again.
