when the grinders cease because they are few,
and those looking through the windows grow dim;
when the doors to the street are closed
and the sound of grinding fades;
when people rise up at the sound of birds,
but all their songs grow faint;
when people are afraid of heights
and of dangers in the streets;
when the almond tree blossoms
and the grasshopper drags itself along
and desire no longer is stirred.
Then people go to their eternal home
and mourners go about the streets.
Ecclesiastes, Chapter 12
For the past year, I have spent a lot of time thinking about death.
Today would have been my grandmother Jane’s 95th birthday. She died last year, less than a month before her 94th.
Following her death, I spent six months living at her house. Along the way, I acquired a small grey cat who accompanied me through those months. Sometimes I look at Rainy the Cat and I am flooded by a visceral memory of the Rancho and our quiet winter there. When I look at her, I remember waking up and spending most of the day wrapped in a sweater on the screen porch, writing, while she hunted lizards or decimated the butterfly population or stalked through the garden.
A neuroscientist recently informed me we remember things better together. She was talking about two humans, but I await the future studies that will address feline-homo sapien brain wave mirroring. It’s nice to have a walking, meowing co-rememberer in my house.
While I was living at the Rancho, soaking up my grandparents’ memories, finishing up my book, I was asked to write an article on the afterlife—its history throughout Christianity, the beliefs around death and dying, and just what exactly Christians have thought and done about it—for US Catholic. You can read the article in the print version of the November 2024 magazine right now.
Of course, along the way, I gathered my thoughts about my own beliefs about death and dying that has coalesced while accompanying Da Jane through a small bit of her journey toward death. They go something like this:
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.
You can read more of that essay on US Catholic as well.
One of the greatest lessons Da Jane taught me last year was that if someone is dying, you go be with them, if you at all can.
So when my aunt informed us that my grandmother Darline is dying, I know that I should go. Visiting the sick is a work of mercy, as is “to bury the dead,” which I would interpret to mean that to walk with someone to the doors of death is just as important a work of mercy as laying their body to rest in the dirt.
The dying need us to be with them, and we need to be with the dying. You learn so much about living from the dying. It may seem morbid to say, but dying is perhaps the most important part of living. This is something Christian history taught me as I wrote that essay for US Catholic.
But, as I woke up in Harrisburg for my early morning flight out of Philadelphia, I wondered if I should accept Frontier Airlines’s offer to delay my flight for a coupon. It was an ungodly hour, I was exhausted, do I really have to go today? I thought. Perhaps tomorrow would do. Death is unpredictable. Unlike a pregnancy, there’s no nine months to prepare, there’s no funneling of time into a single point. Or, perhaps there is: the signs of it are just more quietly advertised than a baby bump.
So, in the dark of my bedroom, I opened my missal to the Saturday of the Twenty-Fifth Week of Ordinary Time—that day’s Mass. The first reading was from the Book of Ecclesiastes: Rejoice, oh young man, while you are young/
Remember your Creator
in the days of your youth,
before the days of trouble come
and the years approach when you will say,
“I find no pleasure in them”—
before the sun and the light
and the moon and the stars grow dark,
and the clouds return after the rain;
Remember God, the teacher writes, before death—
before the silver cord is severed,
and the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
and the wheel broken at the well,
and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
And then I flipped to the Psalm—my favorite—Psalm 90, which proclaims that our lives are like grass, but that God will prosper the work we do here, that God will give us joy to balance the years we knew sorrow, because, “In every age, oh lord, you have been our refuge.”
Our savior Christ Jesus destroyed death and brought life to light through the Gospel, one of the prayers added.
And, finally, in case I didn’t quite get what going on, the missal included a small reading from the Book of Sirach that proclaimed: “Even on the day of death they will be blessed.”
I am suspicious of “signs” like God is some sort of dispenser of fortune cookies for the superstitious among us too afraid to stand by our own judgment. But sometimes, as on the Twenty-Fifth Saturday of Ordinary Time, you hear the word you needed to hear spoken to you. So I went and joined my family around my grandmother’s bedside. Since I hadn’t finished that essay on Da Jane’s death, I wrote about that final gift Da Jane had given me in her death: the prompting to go say goodbye to Darline.
Whenever I think of these two women, I think of the firm footing they have given me to stand on. When Da Jane passed away, I was in a season of homelessness and rootlessness: I needed a place to hibernate, to winter, and to reset. And although Da Jane was gone, I felt her still wrapped around me at the Rancho, providing me with what our elders give us: wisdom to heal us and a foundation to restore us.
Next to my ofrenda, in the living room, I have a little cutting from Da Jane’s beloved fig tree that I planted here in Harrisburg this summer. I imagine myself as one of the little leaves that are slowly sprouting out of it. And I water it patiently, hoping that one day it will be strong enough to live outside on its own.
Here are a few pieces of writing dedicated to my grandmothers:
US Catholic: “Grave Matters,” and “A glimpse of Resurrection”
Jesuit Media Lab: about my birthday visit last month to Fallingwater
My Book: Tantur: Seeking Christian Unity in a Divided City is available for pre-order through Liturgical Press! (Very excited about this.)