Now, with the closing in less than a month, we've been trying to go through the house. It has 70 years of memories, which means it also has 70 years of things. Some of it is amazing, like the trumpet my grandmother played in middle school or the black and white pictures of my grandparents, and of their parents and grandparents, going back at least 100 years. Some of it is touching, like the drawers of unused cards that my grandfather kept around to make sure he didn't miss any occasion. And some of it is like stepping back in time:
What gets me about this cabinet is not so much the fact that my grandparents kept black pepper and tumeric for decades. It's that these aged spices weren't crowded out by newer replacements. There are not rows upon rows of tumeric and salicylic acids, hoarded away. There's just these one or two containers (with maybe a few other types of acid). But there isn't the present-day accumulation crowding out and overwhelming these relics of the past. There's just this small collection of spices - and kool aid? - from decades ago.
I like that it feels like a snapshot in time, but it also feels a little ghostly. Removing clothes, going through papers, sorting through photographs - all of that is sad, and emotional, and difficult to do. But going through the kitchen, with its half used products and familiar breakfast dishes and echoes of so many meals spent around that table? That feels like saying goodbye.
I've been thinking about that more lately, what it means to say goodbye or to keep saying goodbye. A few weeks ago, I stopped by the cemetery where they are buried. I debated whether I would stop there from pretty much the time I went through Springfield. The cemetery is not far off I-44, but I wanted to get back to OK before it was too late. I also wasn't sure exactly why I wanted to stop: I don't believe my grandparents are there in any spiritual sense, I don't believe they can see or hear me, I don't believe my stopping there does anything for them. But I did stop, because I felt like I should and I felt like I wanted to. And, as I sat there alone, I sensed that being there did bring me closer to my grief, even if it didn't bring me closer to my grandparents themselves.
I was in Oklahoma when my grandmother died in her hospital room in Missouri, Although it was already late, my sister and I drove up there. That was another moment I wasn't quite sure why I was going somewhere, to see someone who no longer could respond to being seen. I knew I wanted to go up there for my mother, who had spent so much time and love caring for first both my grandparents and then my grandmother, and who now would be without them both. But why did it matter to see grandma? I don't know. It feels wrong, disrespectful to talk about seeing her body, still in her pajamas, still with her nails painted, and it saddens me to think of her last days being in a cold, sterile hospital room. But I think that maybe, in those last few moments before the funeral home took her away and the business of burial began, being there felt like keeping a promise, that even with them gone, they wouldn't be left alone.
Which is all to say that grief, unsurprisingly, is selfish. From my grandmother's death to the graveside visits to the clearing away of their beloved home, it's all about how I say goodbye, or let go, or come to terms, or feel crushingly sad, about their deaths and all the deaths that their deaths make me consider. And, surprisingly to me, that grief rose to the surface in opening a cabinet to find a row of spices that no one had used in many, many years.
