beautiful monsters

Running from grief

On Friday I was going to drive up to Rotorua to visit my grandparents – my mother’s father and my father’s mother. Nana was in a home and had been sick for some time. Eric was reasonably fit and very active, still living in a place of his own, going on trips and taking up new hobbies. He’d just been admitted to hospital because they thought he had pneumonia. Then on Thursday morning my father phoned to say that Eric had died suddenly.

I left for Rotorua a day early, and it felt like I was running from grief all the way up the island. It was welling up like a flood behind me, but I had to keep ahead of it, keep from falling apart, keep the car on the road and arrive in one piece. Luckily I found an MD of The Shirleys and The Beatles, and I played that at full volume. Singing along seemed to keep my mind off death, and stop the tears from spilling over.

My grandfather was an amazing man. He seized every moment, and lived it to the full. He was an orchardist, a mechanic, a TV cameraman, an amateur ornithologist, and a vegetarian from the age of 6 to 86. He played the double bass, restored and collected vintage Buicks, exhibited camellias, made his own clothes from cloth he had spun and woven, baked bread, kept bees, got involved with the peace movement, started the local chapter of Forest & Bird, and proudly displayed GE Free stickers on his campervan. He traveled everywhere from Vietnam to Norway, and kept travelling with the Pink Coach tours right up until he died.

His funeral was lovely. We had it at my parents house. I painted the coffin, which was really healing, and helped me to express some of the love and memories I couldn’t put into words.

My dad chose some music that was meaningful for my grandfather, and my mother picked camellias from the garden, so everyone could choose one to put in the coffin. She put in one from the tree they picked flowers from for my grandmother’s coffin, and one from the last tree my grandmother planted.

I found this poem by Nancy Wood to put on the back of the service sheet:

You shall ask
What good are the dead leaves
And I will tell you
They nourish the sore earth.
You shall ask
What reason is there for winter
And I will tell you
To bring about new leaves.
You shall ask
Why are the leaves so green
And I will tell you
Because they are rich with life.
You shall ask
Why must summer end
And I will tell you
So that the leaves can die.

I couldn’t speak at the funeral, I just cried. But lots of other people shared stories about Eric, and most had us all laughing. One of my mother’s childhood friends shared about how, without knowing Eric she would not have her love of gardening, and classical music, and the environment. And without Eric and June she wouldn’t have had the confidence to go to university. And without knowing them, she wouldn’t have learned that families sit down and talk together, and that marriages can work.

After the service it turned out that the funeral home had a Buick, so Eric left in style.

I still can’t believe that he is gone. I was his only grandchild, and he was my only grandfather. I miss him so much, I don’t know how I can bear it.

*

I spent a couple more days in Rotorua, and visited my nana. She was so sick, she couldn’t even roll over, or sit up without the nurses coming and moving her. She just lay there, a tiny bird skeleton, crying out “help me, help me,” but when we asked her what we could do she looked at us as if she was surprised to find us there. “Nothing,” she said, “you can’t do anything.” Once she said to me “just wait, I might shut up soon.” She was only on panadol for days, even though she seemed to be constantly in pain. Finally, after my dad kicked up a fuss, they put her on morphine. She seemed a bit less distressed after that. My dad stayed with her all night, and she slipped away early this morning.

I don’t think it’s really sunk in, that she’s dead. I’m still so tired and shattered after the long drive and the funeral, and then the drive back.

Now I feel like I’ve stopped running, but the world keeps rushing past. The grief is washing around me, but I’m so numb, so tired. Life keeps going on and on, and I don’t know what to do, how to cope. All of a sudden I have no grandparents left. My tiny family just got so much smaller.

Posted by Fionnaigh at August 17, 2005 01:07 AM | TrackBack