“I’ll never forget one of the last times I saw her. I can still see her, sitting in that chair in the corner and saying, ‘why does it take so long to die?’”
—Dr. Marion Moses, attending physician to Dorothy Day before her death.
My grandmother Jane—we call her Da Jane—was born a decade after the Spanish Flu pandemic, four years after F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, and just a few weeks after the Black Friday stock market crash of October 1929. She died last October, less than one month before her 94th birthday.
Da Jane gave me not only the obvious things—my mother, my genetic code, my eyes—but also she taught me to bird-watch. She taught me to love books. She taught me to love travel, ask questions, be curious, and notice beauty—in the deer flickering through the pine woods or ripe figs, streaked with purple, ready to be picked.
The last time I saw her really alive, Da Jane suggested we pray together. We’d never done that together, outside of our respective Presbyterian and Catholic church services and grace before meals.
“Guide Renée on her journey,” Da Jane prayed, before I left her on a flight from Raleigh back to Chicago. But that prayer was for her, too.
We both knew that she was on the edge of her own flight into the unknown. I figured God could read her prayer’s subtext and count it for both my journey and Da Jane’s.
When I returned just over a month later, she was on her deathbed.
And she was still alive, yes, but she was no longer alive and living; she was alive and dying. As I walked into Da Jane’s room, her voice greeted me from the hospital bed the hospice team brought to her room. But it wasn’t her voice anymore. It was a croaky, creaky simulacrum of Da Jane’s voice, an echo of which I could still hear. Her eyes began seeing things that weren’t there. I wondered if that was death or the anti-psychotic she was taking. Or both.
For most of my life, I have been very afraid of death—death as an abrupt, irreversible ending: an instant car crash, a bridge collapse, getting sucked out of an airplane window. (If you don’t believe me, just look up “deaths from airplane windows.”) A college friend died a few weeks before his wedding from a head-on collision with a semi-truck that veered into his lane of traffic. From bridges to tunnels to airplane seat selection, whenever I saw the possibility of death lingering at the edge, my hands and heart would go clammy.
I was afraid because I was never sure that there is something on the other side. I mean, there is God, but God’s presence doesn’t seem to be a guarantee that bad or uncomfortable things won’t happen. See: the book of Job, natural disasters, or young mothers of six dying of colon cancer. Although we know that God is on the other side of death, we don’t know what it actually means, what life after death feels like on our skin or in our hearts. Death seemed to cut short life with its meaninglessness and emptiness—and it was cruel because of that.
I spent a week sitting by Da Jane’s bedside. I held her hands. We read psalms. I sang a hymn at her request. As I looked into her face, I could see it becoming marked by death. I could see, from the shadows and sharp edges that dying carved on her face, that death is ugly. I could see she was in pain. She began to look like death, not how we mean it when we say it to a hungover roommate. Something was happening inside her. Death was taking over her face, over her person, over her life, marking it with its image. But even while dying, Da Jane was still so beautiful, still herself. Still cracking jokes, asking questions, handing me her credit card to buy us chicken tikka masala and enjoying it to the last bite. Death, although it was killing her, was not destroying her.
I can see why they say people can have one foot in this world and one foot in the next. It felt like that is what was happening in front of me—I could see Da Jane crossing a threshold, going toward something, slipping into something very real—just not “here.” She was suspended between here and there. She was in the middle of a river, not yet on the other side.
On her way to her destination, Da Jane found footholds for the journey—the psalms, scripture, the familiar words of faith, hymns, and the singing of Christ Church Cathedral’s Cathedral Singers, streaming in from Oxford, crossing the Atlantic Ocean, via the magic of the internet. My friend is a lay clerk in the Christ Church Cathedral Choir. There, on the screen, was my dear friend Crawford, in his choir robes, singing to my dying grandmother.
I learned later that singing and playing music at a deathbed is an ancient practice called music thanatology. Its goal—straight out of Plato—is to use music to guide the soul toward a beauty it has never seen before but already recognizes. “Music can create a space in which change can occur, shifts can happen,” said Barbara Cabot, a music thanatologist, in a 2007 interview. Music thanatology is an ancient practice finding a contemporary resurgence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of musicians in Milwaukee created a nonprofit called Harps of Comfort and played music over Zoom for men and women dying just a few miles away from them.
In the quiet of October evenings, I stroke Da Jane’s still-glossy hair while crooning “Amazing Grace,” as she tosses in her bed fitfully. I have the strong sense that I am a midwife, but, this time, on the inside of the womb. She is being birthed through something; she is in some canal and in some great labor to come out into something on the other side. I have no idea what that is, but she is already halfway there.
As I was writing this essay, my father’s mother, my grandmother Darline died. At 97, it was perhaps to be expected, but the event of death itself is always unexpected, even when you are dying. I think that’s what I realized, walking with my grandmothers, both past their 90th year toward death: Dying, just like an infant’s birth, can’t be scheduled, although it can be induced. It’s always a bit wild.
A year after accompanying Da Jane, I repeat the same journey with Darline. And, although it is so different, something universal shimmers under the surface. Like Good Friday or Easter Vigil, I repeat the same actions a year later, the same liturgy, same sacred rituals: I hold her hand. I stroke her hair. I massage her skull. My family gathers. We pray. We wait.
You learn to breathe so quickly as an infant just outside the womb—in that split second you learn a lesson it takes time to let go of. We struggle to breathe a long time before we stop. Darline lets go of breathing when we all leave her hospice room and my uncle who is staying the night finally dozes off. Hospice workers say that many people stop breathing once their loved ones, gathered to be with them, have left the room. That final step on the pilgrimage from life to death is your own mystery.
Death is a real evil. Even for my grandmothers, who lived full and good lives, it is painful to miss them. Having a loved one removed from the realm of the living is real loss and real sorrow. But to endure an evil together fundamentally alters the experience. Love walks with us into that strange birth canal of dying.
As I watched these women—so alive and so part of my life—pass into the grave, a seed of doubt has been sown in my heart that death has the final word. There is something in us, something connected to a love stronger than death, that lives on even when our bodies grow cold. “You are every second alive,” writes poet Mary Karr to a dead lover. To love someone who has crossed that river of death is to have your own foothold on the journey—the river seems less dark, the other shore a bit clearer and lighter. Perhaps I now sense in death—like Good Friday—a glimpse of resurrection.
Image: Unsplash/Artem Labunsky
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