From the earliest I can remember, I knew my grandparents were in love. They wrote each other letters filled with romance and longing when they were young—and later in life, love emails. They held hands under the dining room table. If I ever expected one of them to side with me against the other, I was always disappointed.
After Ganny died, we thought Gampy would miss her so much he wouldn’t live long without her. And in fact, two days after her funeral, he was hospitalized. His heart stopped twice, only to be revived.
“His heart is broken,” I told Barbara.
He made it clear, though, that he wanted to spend one more summer in Maine, his other great love.
His last summer in Maine, he watched his great-grandchildren play and the surf crash every morning onto the rocks. And in the fall, he watched my sister, his granddaughter, marry her true love. He soaked in every moment of life in that place that for us symbolizes the eternal constant of family.
At my sister’s wedding, I often hid my face from my grandfather so that he would not see me wiping away tears. Once the most powerful man in the world, now he was in a wheelchair. Once the leader of our family, the undisputed patriarch, the man we went to when we had dreams to share or advice to seek now seemed weary, as though the value in each day came from its bringing him that much closer to being reunited with the woman he loved for every minute of their seventy-three-year marriage.
What eased these moments of heartache were my girls. They did not predict, like the rest of us, that he would not live to see another summer in Maine. They saw only that their beloved Great-Gampy was tired. Their mission was to make him laugh. They said, often, “We need to go and hug Great-Gampy!” or “Is Great-Gampy awake? Let’s go tell him good morning!”
The last summer with him I was struck by the contrast between my girls’ bright, innocent laughter and the weight of knowing that my Gampy’s life was coming to an end.
Every summer, I’ve gone with my grandparents to their lifelong Maine church, St. Ann’s Episcopal. This sea-washed stone chapel, built in 1892, is where on rainy days as a little girl I stared out the stained-glass window, wishing the sermon was over so I could go and splash in the puddles. On cloudless days, during the outside services, I looked at the ocean, counting boats and lobster pots as the minister preached. As a young adult, I saw my cousins marry at this very altar. As a mother, I had my babies baptized outside by the sea, my grandparents looking on. Now I try to quiet my children as they squirm or try to run to the seawall, just as my grandparents shushed me thirty-five years ago.
Last summer, for the first time in memory, my grandfather was too sick to go with us to church. After church each Sunday, my father asked Peter Cheney, St. Ann’s chaplain, to come to our house after services. Before lunch, we went to my grandfather’s room, where Reverend Cheney led us in the Communion service. My grandfather, dressed for the day and sitting up in his brown corduroy recliner, eagerly accepted the wafer from the priest’s hand.
One Sunday that summer Reverend Cheney did something different. After we read the Eucharist service and Gampy took the wafer, Reverend Cheney suggested we all sing a hymn together. We asked Gampy what he wanted to sing. I thought he might choose an Episcopal church standard—perhaps “Amazing Grace” or “Lift High the Cross” or “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus.” He surprised us all by choosing “Jesus Loves Me,” the first religious song many of us who grow up Christian ever learn.
We all knew the song, of course, but many of us hadn’t sung it since childhood. Our voices faltering, we joined Gampy’s and sang it the best we could remember, with the ocean waves crashing outside the window as accompaniment.
Jesus loves me—this I know,
For the Bible tells me so;
Little ones to Him belong—
They are weak but He is strong.
Before we were halfway through the song, we were fighting back tears, not making eye contact for fear our emotion would be contagious. The song we’d once sung unthinkingly now carried a message of love and triumph that we needed to hear.
Jesus loves me—loves me still,
Though I’m very weak and ill.
This once-strong man we loved was now weak. And yet he showed us by his song choice that he did not feel ashamed of his infirmity. He felt that God loved him in his frailty as much as he had loved him as a leader of millions.
Jesus loves me—He will stay,
Close beside me all the way;
He’s prepared a home for me,
And some day His face I’ll see.
At the end of the song, all of us were emotional. I clutched a needlepoint pillow that my grandmother had made—its sentiment, “Reading is sexy,” made me smile—and faced my Ganny’s garden, where she could no longer be seen pruning her roses. We knew Gampy would join her soon. Singing with him that day, we felt like children again, and we felt God’s love fill the room.
One of the last times I saw my grandfather alive was in this same bedroom. This is where at the end of a long day he and my Ganny sat quietly together, he reading histories and she meticulously needlepointing Christmas stockings for her great-grandchildren. When they grew older, they listened to beloved audiobooks and watched TV crime shows.
Summer after summer, this was where they slept side by side, their hands entwined.
I saw myself as a little girl and as a teenager and—most unbelievably—as a mother. Now my rambunctious girls pulled me into this same room, saying, “We have to say goodbye to Great-Gampy before we leave, Mama!”
Saying goodbye. To my children, this was just one more goodbye. They believed there would be many more hellos to come. It was hard for me to be around my grandpa because I knew that he would soon be leaving us, but Mila and Poppy had no such distraction. All children know is that this person they love is here and they want to hug him, to tell him about their day at the beach, to say they love him and will see him again soon.
In his room, Mila and Poppy clambered up on Gampy’s lap, in the chair where he sat most days. By his feet, swollen from age and wear, sat his precious service dog, Sully.
My little girls—Poppy, with charisma like his; Mila, with his gentleness and empathy—wrapped their arms around him. Their milky arms served as a stark contrast to his arms, wrinkled and full of age spots, signs of a life spent outdoors. Their youth, his age. Their innocence, his wisdom. Their movements jumpy and urgent, his slow. He was tired, but his eyes brightened with life when they entered the room. He smiled as they petted his hands. He seemed almost like a child. His purity came from God as much as theirs.
“They are beautiful,” he whispered.
To see them together was more than I could bear. I stepped outside to let my tears fall in private. Standing there in the yard, I remembered one of my grandfather’s rules: “You will cry when you are happy and also when you are sad.” I was both. I felt too much.
In that moment, I felt joy to think of what the future held for my beautiful, tender girls and heartbroken that my Gampy would not be with us much longer. He would not see them grow into young women. He would not be there to give them advice when they had their first breakups, nor would he attend their weddings.
I thought of something my Gampy told me when we were visiting him in the ICU at the hospital. I was pregnant with Mila, glowing with that feeling that often comes from a first pregnancy. How hard it was to see suffering when I was flush with the promise of new life. With Mila growing inside me, I felt I was in possession of the best secret in the world. And then Gampy touched my stomach, whispering, “There is death and then there is life.”
Death and life. How poignant it was on that summer day to see them sitting side by side. Old age and youth on the same chair. An end and a beginning.
Just months later, Henry and I attended Gampy’s funeral. We decided the girls were too young to attend in person, so we left them for the day with Henry’s mother. She showed them the funeral on television and told us later that they were a bit confused by it. When my father turned around in the chapel to wave to a friend, Mila thought it was she he was waving at, through the TV. Poppy kept saying, “Why is Gampy in the box?”
I winced when I heard this. I wondered if we should not have let them watch, even on TV.
But how much can you shelter your children when everyone around them is in mourning? They learned about death this year, my little girls. Too young, they became wise. One night after Ganny and Gampy had both passed, I peeked into Mila’s room. In her raspy voice, she whispered, “Mama, come sit with me.”
I sat on the edge of her bed.
“I miss them,” she said. “I miss Great-Ganny and Great-Gampy. And I know you miss them, too.”
She was quiet for a moment, and then she asked, “Mama, are you going to die?”
“Not for a long time,” I said.
“Mama, am I going to die?” she said.
“Not for a very long time,” I said. I hoped I was doing enough to reassure her.
“I know, Mama, but when I do, I won’t be sad because I will see them again and I will see you.”
After a few minutes, Mila continued. “Mama, what do you think heaven is like?”
I told her I didn’t know. I stared at my little girl’s face, aglow from the streetlights. She was so young, yet here she was comforting her mother. I wondered where that grace came from—and in her bright, kind eyes I saw Gampy.