A Celebration of Life

Today, we celebrated the life of Will’s grandmother. Joyce Green was an accomplished violinist, a mom of 6 by blood and 7 more by marriage, a devoted traveler, and the glue that held her large brood together.  I learned today she took the train by herself, starting at age 12, from Wamego to Lawrence, for weekly violin lessons. The picture above depicts her playing in the University of Kansas Symphony Orchestra in 1945. What a love for music. What a love for life. 

Grandma Green was the last of our living grandparents. She was Will's stepmother's own mother, but she never treated Will as any less than a full-bodied grandchild. I remember only a little about my own grandparents. My father's parents both passed away when he was growing up. My mother's parents passed away in 1988 and 1989, when I was old enough to have solid memories of their unconditional love, but young enough not to understand them as adults or as real people in their own right. 

My grandmother died suddenly of a heart attack one snowy January morning on the same day we were scheduled to fly down to Kansas from Seattle. To prepare for our visit, she had purchased raw steaks. Those steaks were stored under the front seat of her 1978 Oldsmobile, unbeknownst to the rest of the visitors to the farm, until the connection was made months later in a hot July day after it was concluded that something must be dreadfully wrong with the Oldsmobile. 

I vividly remember Grandma's funeral, held at the Mulvane United Methodist Church, the same church where she had taught weekly Sunday School to small children for over 30 years. My mother and her sisters and surviving brother sat in the first pew in the sanctuary. My sister and I sat with our cousins in the second row, cognizant perhaps for the first time we were not the center of grief. On the way into the sanctuary, my grandmother's embalmed body lay on display. It looked waxy, frozen, a caricature of her own warm presence. Following the service, we drove to the El Paso Cemetery, where the bitter January wind whipped around the mounds of frozen dirt that had been unearthed. 

The funeral today, despite being over 30 years apart in time, triggered many of these same emotions. The crammed bodies packed into the cozy St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Wamego. The graveside service, but with warm sunshine instead of cold gusts of air. The fellowship with dear family members during the funeral luncheon, with a pulsing desire we see these people on happier occasions. The way my throat locked up as we sang "Amazing Grace," with the final refrain of, "When we've been there, 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun...."

Grandmothers are special. Those by blood, those by marriage, and those by choice. And however long or short their lives are, my sentiment remains: I wish we had more time together.