4.3.12 We feel guilty when someone dies -- Margaret Robbins

Margaret Robbins, Words Unspoken

We feel guilty when someone dies because more often than not, words are left unsaid.  In a negative world, we sometimes do not do enough to tell people how much they meant to us or how much we appreciated them.  With both of my grandmothers, I was lucky enough to get to see them one more time before they moved on from this world. Yet with other people who are important to me, I worry that we will not get to speak the words unspoken until it is too late.

            I remember July 2004, when I saw my grandma Eemie for the last time.  I remember the debate as to whether I should go see her or whether I should go to an event that involved me seeing a certain boy who had caught my eye.  As soon as I got to her nursing home, I knew that I had made the right decision because I could see Death on her face.  She looked at me, and without either of us saying a word, we both knew this would be the last time we’d see each other.  She seemed to feel sympathy for me, knowing that even though she felt ready to go, I would miss her.  We had the usual small talk, and I filled her in about my first year of teaching, which had just passed, and my Master’s degree in English and Gifted Education, which I was just finishing up.  As we were about to part, she looked at me and said, “I love you, Margaret.”  I answered back, “I love you too, Eemie.”  Words were still unspoken between my paternal grandma and me, as there are words unspoken in any relationship.  Yet, the words that were the most important to speak were spoken that day.

            One month later, my dad got a call from the nursing home, asking whether or not to send Eemie to the hospital for treatment.  It was the day before I was to graduate with my Master’s Degree.  My dad had to go on his first instinct, and he said, “The selfish part of me didn’t want her to die that weekend.  So, he sent her to the hospital.  Marita, my dad’s stepsister, is a hospice nurse and initially told my dad that he had messed up by sending Eemie to the hospital and that he should have let her go.  However, the nurses and Eemie’s children alike acknowledged that she had a number of good days after that.  It was just the week before her death that was hard.

            As we were preparing for the funeral Labor Day weekend in High Point, North Carolina, one of the nursing home nurses came to talk to us.  “You know, she was ready to go.”  She was a middle aged African-American woman, and her calm and kind voice sounded like honey.  “She told me that she saw Herbert and Mary and her other brother, and that they were standing outside next to a car, waiting for her.”  My initial reaction, cynically enough, was that the nurse was telling a lie to  make my family and me feel better.  But then I realized that if it had been a lie, she would not have known the names of my grandma’s siblings.

            My Eemie had the typical affluent southern woman’s funeral: well-attended, especially by older ladies with frosted hairdos and starched and pressed suits.  Many of these women remarked at how beautiful my grandma always looked.  While this was true, I wished this wasn’t the only thing we remembered about them.  I think part of why we feel guilty when someone dies is that we don’t like to speak ill of the dead, and we don’t like to admit that the person had actual, human flaws.  My grandma was a mean spirit at times, and she loved to gossip.  However, no one seemed to want to gossip about her at her funeral.

            My Gran and Patty drove up from Chapel Hill to go to the funeral.  Unbeknownst to Gran at the time, her own funeral would be less than four years later.  I also remember the last time I saw my Gran, my maternal grandmother, on her nursing home bed.  She was asleep for the first hour that I arrived at the Duke nursing home, after I had spent some time in Chapel Hill visiting two of my best friends from high school, one of who drove in from Virginia. It seemed depressing to drive all the way to North Carolina just to see my dying grandma, so I decided to combine it with a weekend of my old writing camp pals, Hollie and Laura. 

            While I was waiting for Gran to wake up, I couldn’t help feeling slight dismay at the fact that Fox News was blaring in her room.  My grandma was as liberal as southern women of her generation came, so I would have thought that CNN would be her network of choice, or at least ABC.  But these days, I thought, she perhaps isn’t as picky.  I remembered back in December, when we spent Christmas Eve 2007 moving her from her assisted living home in Raleigh to her nursing home near Duke University in Durham.  When the EMTs first wheeled her in, my dad and I were waiting for her.  I had her favorite stuffed bear waiting for her, and she demanded to have her radio.  She had not been able to sleep without her radio in forty years, since her husband, the man who would have been my paternal grandfather, died of an unexpected heart attack.  I promised to bring her radio soon, along with other goodies.  My dad told me I had handled her well.  I had done my best, but it was still sad for me to see my feisty Gran, who had been an Executive Director of the Girl Scouts, reduced to a pouting, child-like elderly lady.

            When she finally woke up during my visiting weekend in February, she recognized me immediately and seemed like her sharp self. She said hello and apologized for sleeping so long.  I insisted it was fine, and told her about the weekend I had spent visiting my old friends.  I then continued with small talk: I was teaching all gifted reading and language arts classes at my middle school, and my reading bowl team was advancing to the state level in two weeks.  I had a roommate, and we were getting along well.  And then, of course, she turned to her usual favorite topic:

            “Well, Miss Margaret Ann, we need to find you a boyfriend.”

            I decided not to remind her that I used to have a boyfriend, but we had broken up about a year and a half ago.  Instead, I said, “well, yes, but I think those things have a way of happening when they are meant to.”

            “Yes, I think you’re right,” she said wistfully.  I think she was sad that she wasn’t going to get to meet whomever I was going to marry, even though she had met my sister’s law school boyfriend, the man who would later become her fiancée.  Eemie had met Lane, the boy my sister dated in college, and we were all content to let her think they were going to get married.  

            We continued to talk for a  while, and then, I let her rest.  I was glad I had gone to see her before driving back to Atlanta that evening. 

            Two weeks later, my mom and my Aunt Pat had to fly to North Carolina, even though she had just been to visit her the weekend after me, because Gran had taken an unexpected turn for the worse.  I offered to go, but my mom said she thought it would be better for me to stay and be with my students who I was helping to coach for the state reading bowl tournament. (That, after all, was a situation I could control).  That Friday afternoon, once we were settled in Athens, I had a hunch that I should call my mom.

            She picked up the phone.  “Gran can’t really talk much right now, but I’m sure she would love to hear your voice.”

            “Hi Gran,” I said into the phone.  When I did not get a verbal response, I began to understand the reality of the situation.  “Hi Gran, I love you,” I said, seemingly to the dead air.

            “She smiled,” my mom said into the phone, and I was sure she had shown a reaction of sorts.

            About an hour later, my phone rang, and I recognized my dad’s number.  Because we were about to take the students to dinner and because I knew what the call probably meant, I decided to let it go to voice mail.  We had dinner at the Grill, and my young students enjoyed hamburgers and milkshakes without being vaguely worried about what the food would do to their physical health.  I missed those days.  Zach swallowed his hamburger wrong, and him mother ran over because she had the faint worry that her son would choke.  She was as white as a ghost, and as I looked into that mother’s eyes, I figured that if one person was meant to pass away, it should not be a young child.

            When we got back to the hotel, I called my dad.  He told me that my Gran had indeed passed away while my mom and my Aunt Pat had stepped out for dinner.  Apparently, people do that a lot: they wait and die when people are out of the room, as if showing a sign of respect.  “Well, I know people can say things about her, good and bad, but she tried really hard to be a good grandma to me, Patty, and my cousins,” I told my dad.

            “Well, she was a very strong woman, and I see a lot of strong and smart ladies on the Ruffing side of the family.”

            “Thanks, Dad.”  Somehow, Dad knew what I needed to hear that day, that week.  At her burial, when I really cried for the first time, my distant cousin would remind me that my Gran still lived within me.

            That evening, I asked the other coaches if I could go to bed early, and they understood.  I wasn’t particularly sad, as I have been preparing for this day for months and cried more back in October when I first heard she was sick.  I just needed time to process the information. 

            Even though my Gran had moved on from this world, I was glad I was able to have my last conversation with her.  Now, four years later, I wonder whom else I need to have my last conversations with before we leave this world.  I am only 31, so unless an unexpected freak accident occurs, I will probably be here for a very long time.  Both of my grandfathers died young, but both of my grandmas lived to be 88.  My parents are in their sixties and are in relatively good health.  Even though I know I have a long time, I have this deep down fear that words will remain unspoken for too long.  Right now, in my life, I have a couple of friends who are important to me with whom I am not on the best of terms.  I am praying for an opportunity to arise for us to spend time together and, hopefully, rekindle our friendships.

            I have learned that life is short in the span of the entire universe, and it is important for people to know what they mean to us. Even though I don’t talk to some of my friends as much as I would like to, I still make sure that I remember their birthdays. My grandmas were not perfect, but I still made time for one last visit with each of them.  We should be careful of the words we speak, because we don’t want the apologies to be the words we never speak.  The fewer harsh words said and words unspoken, the fewer regrets we will have.