Writing about the dead

Early fall, I stopped borrowing library books for my grandma. She couldn’t follow a story anymore, couldn’t remember what she read from one chapter to the next. 

Of all the things aging steals, I think this was the hardest for me. My grandma—who only had a tenth grade education—read everything she could get her hands on. When she stopped reading, it felt like a death.

By December, she moved into hospice care. My daughters were still riding the bus to her condo after school, and one day my aunt asked me to grab Grandma’s suitcase, pack the sweaters and nightgowns on her bed, and bring it by her house so she could take it to my grandma. I walked through the lot that separates my house from my aunt’s, carrying my grandma’s small blue suitcase and my pad of paper. 

“You’re the writer in the family,” my aunt said, “so you should write her obituary.” I dropped off the suitcase and filled a page with notes and dates and places. 

Like most writers, I wrote draft after draft in my head for weeks afterward. When I finally sat down to write the obituary for my paternal grandma whose house I live in, whose land I garden, and whose fire I sit in front of on cold mornings, I could not do it. 

I could not write an obituary for a woman who was still alive. 

In high school, I took a trip to Washington, DC, with the newspaper staff at my school. We visited the NPR studios where we saw the room where they stored all the obituaries for people still alive. This was the late 90s and most things were still stored in binders and folders. There was a room—maybe the size of a large walk-in closet—where the obituaries of well-known people of a certain age were stored on metal shelves. I only remember a few things about this trip, and this is one of them. I think about this room and what it held often, wondering who they’ve written about recently and if everything is now just on a Google Drive somewhere. 

It never occurred to me an actual person was researching and writing about an alive person as though they were already dead. I’m sure they didn’t actually know the person, but still, writing about an alive person as if they are no longer alive is disconcerting.

In the middle of March, my grandma went to sleep and didn’t wake up. She was adamant she did not want to wither away in a bed. She was adamant she did not want to be kept alive when she was no longer interested in living. And so she lost consciousness, was made comfortable with a mercy called morphine, and, less than 9 hours later, she took her last breath. 

I saw her a few hours before she passed away. I got to tell her I loved her, that it was okay to go, that everything was okay here. She didn’t have to keep fighting. 

My grandma fought her whole life. Born at the tail end of the Great Depression, she fought for food and fertile soil in southern Illinois as a child. She fought for an education with her three sisters. She met my grandpa after he started a fight at the skating rink when she was in high school. She fought to make a new life in Indiana with four small children and no support system. On bad days, she fought my grandpa. She fought through the grief of losing her husband, her daughter, her great grandbabies. She fought leaving the house she loved, because even though it was too much for her, it was still her home. 

The most challenging part about writing about the dead is fighting the strong urge to romanticize a person or a life. I believe it’s a disservice to whitewash the human experience by pretending everything was good and shiny and easy. My grandma’s life was not always easy. Being married to her husband was not always easy. Raising her grandchildren and great grandchildren could not have been easy. But she did it all with generosity and love. I’m sure, like all of us, she would have done some things differently. She was not perfect or without flaw, just like all the best people.

The evening she passed away, I sat down to finish her obituary. It was not suddenly easy, but it was easier than before. It felt like I was writing to honor her instead of writing to anticipate her death. She longed for death, but I, selfishly, could not join her in that. I had to wait until the idea became a reality.

My stubborn, smart, scrappy grandma lived a good, long life, but she was tired. I’m so glad she’s finally able to rest.