for Steve Pedersen

It’s true what they say of death, how it arrives when we are not ready for it – we are never ready for death – even autumn leaves hang on as long as they can and we’re lucky to get some good color out of the season, some beauty out of pain.

Isn’t that what art does – make beauty from pain? All loss is profound. Hell, when I can’t find even a favorite article or item, some longed-for object, I am beside myself. How much more, then, when a loved one passes? We are left holding the empty sack that once contained possibilities now spilled on the lawn outside heaven’s door.

I remember the death of my grandma. Fortunately I have many fond memories. She was the nurturer in my life, even from a distance – but I regret that my nephews, my niece, my son did not have the closeness I had with her. She moved five times in her long life. Her father disappeared, and without a mother, she became mom to her siblings. Then she married Elmer and lived a pioneer woman’s life on the farm for sixty some years – even as a widow for many years after grandpa passed. She loved living independently far from town on the section of land Elmer homesteaded.

Then the day came for her to move to town into a small two bedroom house – the living room full of a quilt being built, just like back on the farm. Then after quite a few good years, the time came for her to move to an assisted living, one-room apartment. Now her quilting was displaced in an adjoining, common room – but still she quilted. Her last move, of course, was to the nursing home or rest home (as curiously we call it), and of course no one returns from there – and this knowledge could not have escaped her. Her wide, open sky prairie section of better than 600 acres, now reduced to a bed and a chair with a few photos and quilt blocks hanging on the wall. This, the progression (or is it digression) of life.

I was fortunate. There was much beauty in her life. Much beauty in her pain. She was a poem. Even the last time I saw her, weak but determined to sit upright in her chair, falling in and out of sleep – in and out of conversation. She passed a few days later. There was beauty, and beauty remains in memory of her life, despite her last breaths choking for dear life while clutching faith. Death always hurts. It stings. It is always inconvenient – I have nothing else to say. What can be said? Except maybe this is why we write. Maybe this is why we have each other. Our voice – an echo of grandmas everywhere.