August 06, 2003

My grandmother died Saturday before last - July 26 at 12:30. My wife and I drove in to see her and were able to before she passed.

I have spent the last hour looking online for a passage that was read at her funeral, during which I was sobbing uncontrollably, because I thought it would make me feel better:

Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

Book Of Common Prayer, The. Burial of the Dead, “First Anthem,” (1662).

This is derived from:

Man born of woman is of few days and full of trouble. He springs up like a flower and withers away; like a fleeting shadow, he does not endure.

Job 14: 1-2

Normally a discussion of the amazingly wonderful complexity of research would follow such quotes (and she would have enjoyed that), but instead I am just going to say that I loved my grandmother very much for who she was to me. After her death I am left feeling that my life is small, short, and meaningless, but particularly small in comparision to her's, which was large in the smallest of ways: she touched a large number of people just by being kind to them.

A few days after her funeral my brother and sister went to see a friend of the family's who is over 100 years old. I wasn't able to go, but my sister said that she was just sort of dispensing advice as people of that age do sometimes without proding. One of the things that she said was that you didn't need to worry about the big things, but that you only had to do the little things - being loving towards your siblings, being a kind husband to your wife, etc. - and that the rest would work itself out.

My grandmother was a master at getting the details right - she was kind to everyone from her grandchildren running around her house full of delicate antiques (or more like racing around in her wheelchair and running into walls) to the nurses and visitors that she saw when she, an intellectual her entire life, had lost her sight, hearing, ability to walk, and memory. She was somehow able to entertain people up to weeks before her death despite the fact that she was unable to remember who they were most of the time.

I will miss her, and I will also miss the place that I now realize she held in my life: what she represented, or better yet was, since she did not represent something but instead was something that other people weren't. And I am empty.

August 6, 2003 02:38 PM