I was there, early that morning in September when she left this world. So powerful, watching her pass, that I actually turned around in her bedroom, looking for the light of Heaven pouring through the ceiling. I expected to see that light in angled beams, across the corner of the room.
But there was no light.
Later, when attending a grief counseling session, the therapist said to me, "How much closer can you be to the gates of Heaven in
this life, except when someone you love passes?" Those words, I'm positive, will never, ever leave me. Those words gave me a new perspective of death.
It has loomed in the shadows around me all of my life. First with my great grandfather, living with Mom and Daddy when I was just a little girl. I loved him dearly. He was one of the few people in this life that I trusted.
When he lived in our basement, age had taken quite a bit of his hearing. The TV would blare out tunes of yesterday as Lawrence Welk conducted his orchestra. He loved listening to the old tunes, asking me every so often to turn it up a little louder.
Every morning, Mom would tell me to go to see if Big Daddy was
awake. We called him that. Big Daddy. And every morning, I'd do what I was told. I'd walk down the stairs to his chamber and gently say his name until he turned his head to look at me and smile. He was already in his mid to late eighties.
When he passed away a few days before his 93rd birthday, I was heartbroken. By then, I was living a life no one would know, but he was my safe haven. He was my everything. I was in the fourth grade when he passed. Elvis died later that year.
I can still remember two of many cousins driving me back to school that afternoon after the funeral. I can still remember Mom pulling a flower from his casket spray that is pressed still, today, in the huge bible that sits in the den.
One of the cousins that drove me back to school after Big Daddy's funeral eventually took her own life several years later. She'd been in Desert Storm and was suffering from depression. She left a three page suicide note and her oldest child, a daughter, heard the gun shot that took her Mother's life, down by an empty barn.
Her funeral was surreal. The amount of family, friends, military personnel was uncountable. We sat stunned. We questioned every moment. We couldn't understand. She was just 33.
As the military shot off a 21 gun salute, the irony hit me so hard. I knew the guns would spout off rounds, but every round jolted my body. Here, standing in the cemetery, she was being saluted with the very same weapon that took her life.
My grandmother passed one September afternoon, in 1998. I wasn't there when she passed, but her daughter was. So overcome with grief, Mom wouldn't talk to me on the phone. She handed the phone to my Dad and he told me Mom had been in the room when she passed on and the rest of Mom's siblings had made the decision to go out and buy my Grandmother balloons and cake for her birthday. She passed a day before celebrating her 80th birthday.
There are countless aunts, uncles, great aunts & uncles that have passed. It happens like this when your extended family is as large as mine. There are going to be more and more as these next few years pass. Mom's oldest brother is pushing 75; Daddy will be 73 this year. This generation above me is aging so rapidly that it puts my own age in perspective.
I've felt my Mother around me, as so many of us do, after a great love has passed on. I've realized that the impact of her death has changed me in so many ways. I've learned, if nothing else, to say the things I need to say to old friends, the ones I love and try really hard to not have regrets. Life is so short here.
I'm thankful when I read that one of the last things to go is their hearing when they are dying. I hope she heard my voice whisper into the night as I held her hand, how much I loved her, would be lost without her, but no longer wanted her to suffer. At the time, although I didn't truly realize what my heart was speaking, I gave her permission to leave me.
I never saw that light. I turned looking for her and my grandmother. I watched hard, half expecting apparitions of them, standing in the corner, bidding me farewell. But it doesn't work that way. It's not meant for us to see until our own time rolls around the corner.
Because a few simple words can weigh heavily in your mind or on your heart, when he said to us, "I can't believe she'll be gone three years come September", it spurred a series of these thoughts for me.
Tonight, we hung out in the backyard. Weather has been glorious the last couple of days here in Northern Kentucky.
