Rubbing his feet. Pulling the covers over his body. Tucking him in one final time.
He never woke. We knew he was near the end. We knew we couldn’t give him the care he needed in his home alone if he woke.
He didn’t wake. He slept peacefully, with the love of his family filling his final days.
I’d spent much of his final month with my grandfather. Cooking for him, giving him medicine, tending to his wounds. Lung cancer had come back. He fought it once. He’d been told his life was over when I was young. We were given 20 more years with him.
And I got to be there as he welcomed the end of a life well lived. A full life. Mistakes, yes. Regrets, maybe. But life lived through and through.
My grandfather had been a social justice advocate. With a strong compass and unashamed voice he called for justice with his every breath.
But often in his early years the grander fight for justice was prioritized over family ties. Over respecting and loving the people in front of him.
My grandmother was both heartbroken by and deeply in love with him. They were divorced for decades, but always loved each other. They couldn’t successfully share a home, but had tried many times. Toward the end of his life the love my grandpa had for Grandma G took over his whole being. You could see it in his eyes every time he looked at her.
As they recounted stories of the love and pain they shared, I was able to be wrapped in the history that made me.
Broken, imperfect, righteous, humble beings who lived in a world full of injustice. Ancestors who both fought to bring about equity and peace and at the same time, reproduced harm.
The moon is an image that always ties me to my people. My grandparents told a story of the beautiful orange moon that blessed them on one of their first dates. My children still blow kisses to my grandparents through the moon. It connects us and leaves us in awe of the world that is.
In his final weeks my grandfather was visited by old dear friends and colleagues who had long ago passed. They came to his basement apartment. He held brief conversations with them as he sat in his old and failing body amidst the stacks and piles of anti-war, justice and peace books.
My grandfather did not believe in an after-life. He did not know what would happen to him. His father had been a United Church of Christ minister with ancestors from Germany. When my great-grandparents returned to Germany to visit before World War 2, alarm bells sounded for them, their lives forever changed. Shaken by the horror they saw and committed to bring awareness to injustice.
My great-grandmother was a ministers wife, orderly and controlled. She died the day before I was born. My great-grandfather was a gentle soul, who found passionate love and remarried in his 80s.
The day my great-grandfather died I was eight. I sat on the floor in front of a full-length mirror in our duplex on Ten Rod Road as cars whizzed by outside. I was fully consumed by trying to get my hair straightened into a high ponytail when the phone rang. A phone call that marked the end of a life.
Two weeks into my freshman year of high school we got a similar call. I answered the phone and heard my grandmother’s broken voice ask to speak to my mom. I sat on the edge of my mother’s bed as tears poured down her face. My uncle had been sitting on his couch in Arlington. After a normal day of work he’d called his mother, so she could hear the joy in his 3 year daughter’s voice. His wife was near by and he mentioned that he did not feel well. Moments later his heart stopped beating. His body collapsed. He lived for three more months in a vegetative state. My family put their lives on hold in Seattle and Rhode Island and stationed themselves together by his bedside. Unified by love, we navigated the struggle hand-in-hand.
In reflecting now, I actually think my uncles death may have saved my life.
The night we got that call, I had been walking in what felt like a broken and harsh world with no sense of purpose or direction. My brother had dropped out of high school and was lost in the depths of drugs and alcohol. I was following his path.
But when John collapsed, I had to take on responsibility. My mom needed me to help at her shop and help at home. My family needed me.
And through the grieving process my mom found the Unitarian Universalist church. The church where I found community, purpose and hope. Death brought me closer to life and my faith allows me to hold the complexities of this world.
Death.
Life.
Faith.
All so fleeting and precious.