In Loving Memory of Elizabeth Jean Cummings
March 1, 1930 – September 23, 2012
As it slid out of the car, I felt the weight transfer to the four of us and felt a rush of panic.
“Is everyone alright? You guys got it?” asked the man with sunglasses. Snippets of a horrific future flashed through my eyes. I stumbled and let my corner of the box crash to the Earth. I watched the roots and rocks wrangling up at my feet, trying to trip me and knock me off balance. I saw some tiny, tendon in my lower back in x-ray vision. I saw it snap.
“Actually, I think I ought to have a hand.” It was embarrassing, but better than the seemingly inevitable alternatives. Sunglasses nodded and hoisted the handle on the front and the five of us marched solemnly up the small grass hillock to a step which led to a set of rollers held by a metallic apparatus sitting over the grave. Being at the front, my corner was the first on the rollers, and thus my nightmare-parallel-universes disappeared with a sigh of relief. Sunglasses and his corpulent counterpart slid the coffin on to the rollers and the four of us grandchildren stood in a line, not sure what else to do.
I put my hands in the pockets of my black suit-coat and looked at the ground. I looked to my left and to my right and saw that my cousins had their hands crossed in front of them. I crossed my hands in front of me and went back to looking at the ground as the corpulent man cleared his throat and began to speak.
A week earlier, I was making the all-too-familiar drive between Tufts and Concord after a long day of class, practice, and meetings. Luckily, I didn't need to think about the drive itself. I let my mind wander to the events that now had me en route to my parents' home on a Thursday evening in September.
Like seemingly everything, it started with a phone call. But which phone call was the true catalyst? Was it the call I had received that day that my grandmother had stopped responding to human interaction? Had stopped eating and drinking? Was it the call to my Peruvian cell phone in the airport in Lima when my father told me that an MRI had shown my grandmother full of cancerous, irreparable tumors and was being moved into hospice care until “the end”? Or was it even earlier - was it last fall when my grandparents moved out of their house in rural New Hampshire and into assisted living to be closer to my mother and her brother? Or was it even longer ago than that? Was it the three, four, five years ago when my grandmother began to lose her memory to dementia?
Except for the medical definition of death, there seems to be no single event that tells us when a person is gone. Today, at least in the case of my grandmother, people seem to fade away more than pass away. And so, it's been difficult looking back at the last twenty-two years I've shared with my grandmother. It seems that her consciousness began to fade right as mine began to fully develop. Because of this poor timing, I'm not sure that either of us ever really got to know the other in the same way that I’ve grown to know my parents, brother, cousins, aunts, and uncles.
Now, I consider myself fundamentally a pragmatist. When my father's father passed away, after also suffering from dementia for many years, I remember having a similar feeling – the feeling that I had said “goodbye” long before, even if I hadn't known it at the time. I remember a particularly traumatic trip to visit him in his final weeks of life. I felt that the tiny, sunken man with the respirator couldn't possibly be the happy, goofy grandfather that I had known and loved since I was born. But then a nurse brought him to a piano and, though his fingers were too weak to press all of the keys with the same forte he had had as a young man, his hands still glided across the keyboard to produce a hauntingly beautiful melody. The soft, broken tune proved to me that, yes, this was him. Somewhere inside that unfamiliar frame was the person I knew and loved.
When I came back to the States from Peru, one of my first priorities was visiting my grandmother with my family. When I walked in, I wasn't sure if she would even recognize me, but not only could she identify me, she critiqued my scruffy curly hair and gross traveler's beard. A few minutes later she'd be confused and disoriented, but there were always moments when her smile or laugh would come out and the context of where we were and why we were there would disappear for just a second. But less than a month later, as I was driving home to Concord, I knew that this time, if I went to see her, there would be no laughter, no smiling, no heckling about girls or my (still) shaggy hair.
Still, they say that hearing is the last thing to go, so I felt it important to really say “goodbye.” I wrote some words down, which I read to her over the phone and would become the basis for the eulogy I would read the next week. I like to think that some part of her consciousness was still there, active and listening, even if her physical exterior was gone. I’d practiced the speech in my room, but as I sat in the back corner of the gym before cross country practice, hiding behind the pole-vault mats and old stationary bikes, I couldn't help choking up. This kind emotion is something you can't simulate. You can only learn to expect it.
The ripples of that goodbye ran through me as I walked across the gym to practice, as I ran a hard tempo run around fresh pond, as I tried to hold it together through a meeting with my senior thesis group, and as I finally glided through the dark along Route 2 towards Concord that night. As I approached the light at Walden Pond – a reassuring landmark that tells me I'm almost home – I see a flood of brake-lights. Cars peel around to the left and I suddenly understand why.
A big-antlered buck deer is lying in the road. He looks around, terrified and confused, lost. He tries to stand and make an escape, but his legs betray him. He slumps back down and looks around hopelessly for who knows what. He tries to stand and again his legs refuse to cooperate. He resigns to a dejected looking pile on the pavement.
The next call comes at 2am on Sunday. I'm sleeping at my parents' house, as I have been since the first call, mostly as a pretty face and moral support. No one else would call at this hour; even the telemarketers aren't that bold. This can only mean one thing. I hear my parents rustling around the house and when I see the hall light turned on, I know for sure.
It's a long day, but there's a brief calm before the storm. Monday comes and I'm designing molten oxide electrolysis reactors, building robots, and deriving the acoustic wave equation as if nothing has happened. By Wednesday, the calm is ending and, for the first time since my grandparents moved, I'm driving 80 miles-per-hour up 89N towards Canaan. It's hard not to feel excited, as this road led to family Thanksgiving festivities as a boy, to wild nights visiting my brother at Dartmouth as a teen. I put on an old mellow play-list: “I'd like to live beneath the dirt, where I’d be free from push and shove like others swarming up above. Beneath their heels I’ll spend my time.”
The song is one I stole from my brother's collection in high school – which I’d never admit to him. He arrives to the funeral home an hour or so after I do.
“Sup, Small-fry?” his affable greeting. “Good to see you.”
“Under better circumstances...” would become the apparent mantra of the next twenty-four hours.
The funeral home is small and filled with metal folding chairs all facing forward. It looks like the scene of a PTA meeting or undergraduate lecture, save the coffin sitting where one would might expect a table or projection screen.
The calling hours last from 4-6pm. The four of us grandsons sit in a row along a wall mostly as ornamentation while a few dozen, mostly elderly, acquaintances of my grandparents and parents come through. Some stop to shake out hands or introduce themselves. Most smile awkwardly and just walk by. We stand and sit in unison. By the end, we're pretty well coordinated.
A few minutes before 6pm, the minister walks to the alter. There are a few minutes of religion and he says a few words about my grandmother. Finally, it's time for the family member's eulogies. My mother and her brother agreed that they wouldn't be able to stand up in front of a crowded room and talk about their mother without falling apart, so the duties were passed on to the in-laws: my father and aunt. And me.
The adults go first. I honestly expect this to be fairly calm and manageable. I was a veteran at this point. I had read my speech before.
But, there's something contagious about grief. As I listen to my Aunt struggle to make it through her own beautifully crafted words, her tears, her choking up, reverberate off the fake wood paneling and hit me square in the chest. This is only amplified by my mother's own sobs, hitting me even more directly. I realize that as much as I loved my grandmother, the weight I'm feeling isn't entirely sadness for her. It's the sadness I feel seeing those I love in pain – my mothers sob's, my father's tight grip on her hand. And it's bigger than that too, it's unspoken implication of mortality, with everyone in the room taking it on in his own way. Those to whom my grandmother was a peer, may see her death as an implication of their own. Others may think of their own loved ones who may be slipping away. To me, I put myself in my parents' shoes. I think of how close we've come in the last 5 or 8 or 22 years and I think about a world without them. A world where my mother or father is lying in a box in a dimly-lit room filled with folding chairs and an uncomfortable assortment of people I kind of know. This is the most devastating world I can imagine and the weight of it all comes crashing down. By the time I stand up from the row of grandsons – alone this time – I feel the entire emotional weight of the room, of this world, and of everyone's own personal worlds, on my shoulders.
I unfold my words which suddenly feel insufficient and insignificant. Looking up at the crowd, I take a deep breath.
The next morning, I'm in new territory. I stand in the Canaan cemetery in a line with the other grandsons and stare at the headstone, my hands clasped in front of me, as the corpulent man clears his through and begins to speak. The day is beautiful: bright and crisp. Fall in New England. But all I feel is the weight of human emotion in the air. My rough-and-tough cousin stands next to me and I hear him sniffle and wipe a tear from his eye as he reads his beautifully appropriate last remarks. My mother is sobbing. My father is holding her. My usually-stoic grandfather stares at the ground, his red aviator sunglasses covering tearful eyes. I try not to fall apart. I look at the mechanism that holds the coffin over the grave and try to figure out how it's going to lower that box down. I don't see any moving parts. I don't see any coils of wire or detachable pieces. I keep looking. Investigating.
We stand as the man makes a few more remarks and asks the family members to take a rose from the bouquet which rests atop the coffin. My mother and her brother step up and the intensity floods back over all of us, over me. I look back at the mechanical design and keep trying to figure out how that apparatus could possibly lower that big heavy box the final few meters into the ground. But suddenly it's my own turn to stand in front of the coffin, say a prayer, and take a rose. I can't ignore the emotion any longer and let it wash over me like a pouring rain. I stand for a moment with my brother, quietly say the most appropriate prayer I can think of, and take a rose. I then turn around and join the rest of my family as we walk away together from the mound and the hillock and the crane system that I'll never understand.
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If you made it all the way through that, congratulations! and thanks for reading! I mostly wrote this as a way to get some of the things I've been thinking and dealing with for the last couple of weeks in a more organized form. I also recorded a cover of the song mentioned in this essay ("Dirt" by Phish) which I've also decided to share. Listen to it here: Dirt
For any audio-nerds out this: the track was recorded using Ableton Live 7 interfaced with a Presonus Firepod. All tracks were recorded separately using Shure SM57s in stereo and mixed and engineered in Ableton.
