My last living grandparent is in the Alzheimer's wing of a nursing home, where my family and I now visit her, instead of in her old white house in my hometown. My dad had suggested I swing by her house to see if there was anything meaningful to me that I would like to keep, since her house would soon be sold.
I walked through the screened-in porch where my cousins and I used to sit on the front porch swing, singing as loudly as we could. I turned the front doorknob, stepped inside. Then stopped. I'd already known some furniture had been moved out. I was prepared for the usual cardboard boxes and disarray that clutter a building about to be vacated. I wasn't surprised by the musty smell of a house no longer lived in. But I was not expecting what I saw to the right of me---
Her Christmas tree.
In July.
In front of the living room window, with the white snowman tree skirt circling beneath it, ornaments still dangling from its branches.
I felt my heart crumple.
"Is that when it happened?" I scanned through my memory. Yes, the holiday season was when her condition became more than what my family and home-help could provide for.
I sat in the quiet. I noticed a miniature ornament of Santa and Mrs. Claus---their lips innocently touching under painted ceramic mistletoe---fallen on the floor beneath the tree that had sat in this empty room all these months, through the changing seasons. Without even knowing why, I reached to the floor, picked up the colorful decoration by its golden strand, and hung it back on the tree. The clock in the den continued its methodical tick, its voice much more prominent in the vacant house. I looked around the square room and recalled how so many of us had crammed in a circle to open presents each Christmas Eve---squeezing into chairs, the couch, or even corners on the floor. Yet I'd never noticed until now just how tiny the room was or wondered how we ever fit.
I picked up my cell phone and almost made a call just to distract myself from the present task, but decided it perhaps would be better to simply feel the silent moment of loss.
At fourteen years old, when I helped my family pack boxes out of my other grandparents' home, I couldn't bear the pain. So I doggedly packed items into boxes, as if I were mechanically hauling items out of an anonymous warehouse, and hauled them to the car without a glance back at the little country home that had been my absolute favorite place on earth. And for the twenty-one years since that day, I repeatedly have dreams at night that I am back at my maternal grandparents' home---seeing details I hadn't thought of in years---the broken bureau drawer, my grandma's blue brush and hand mirror she kept on top of the bathroom washer, the living room rust-colored chair where I stashed a magazine full of Christmas stories under the cushion for safekeeping. "But my dad's mom hasn't died," I whispered to myself about my last remaining grandparent. "She's in the room in town where we look at a book of her hometown together." But remembering how she no longer knew our names or couldn't recall that my dad was her son, I felt that a loss had already taken place.
So with a heaviness inside, I slowly packed items into a box---the sheer white curtains from the front bedroom where I spent the night; tons of books which, when I opened the front flap, contained words in my handwriting: "Merry Christmas, Grandma! Love, Misty, 2002;" her women's devotional Bible, which we all had given her one year; several books about Jesus; a cassette tape of my cousins and I singing in elementary school; a framed photo of my aunt who died when I was 10; cassettes full of Christmas songs; a snapshot of the members of my home church posed in front of the old stone building on a sunny Easter morning---me in a pink Easter dress, huge hair bow, and dressy white socks pulled up to my knees.
I felt the mixture of emotions that moments charged with memories can bring---
deep sadness at what would be no more;
faint smiles at the memories brightly colored Christmas boxes called forth;
and
the desperate,
pleading,
yearning hope
for a time,
a place,
a world
where hurt, sorrow, pain, death, and loss will exist no more.
But---
until we reach that place where our hearts never break again---
I simply felt it. I didn't divert my attention with phone calls or search for a radio to lose myself in the music. I didn't rush through my task and absent-mindedly toss precious, treasured items into a cardboard box.
I sat on the back step and looked at the tree my cousins, brother, and I had climbed and dangled from like monkeys. I let my hands feel the worn edges of the hymnbook on top of the piano, its yellow pages crumbling from the spine.
I have often lived my life as a runner from pain, blocking out what is just too hard for me to process, locking my emotions away and pushing myself forward to the next project because it seemed the only way to keep from falling apart.
But pain eventually demands our attention, refuses to be ignored.
So that is what I did yesterday, when the hurt began to wash over me.
I allowed myself to do the very thing I usually run from..
I simply felt it.
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