“Why did Grandma die, doesn’t she love us anymore?”
When my mother was dying several years ago, we gathered for a week at her bedside, all eleven of us, her children, coming in from all parts of the country, also numerous grandchildren.
My mother’s body was shot, after living with cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, and a host of other maladies, including my father who now had Alzheimer’s. She’d had enough; it was her time to go.
When I was growing up, we went on weekly picnics in the nice weather. My mother loved to sing; she had a beautiful voice. She and my father, whose voice was not as exceptional, would lead us in the old songs that they grew up with. We would all sing around the fire at night and on all those drives to and from.
So, around my mother’s bed, we sang these same songs. When we got the words wrong she would jump in and help us. Then she died.
I missed when she passed out of her body and briefly burst into tears when one of my sisters said she was gone.
The next day I was hanging out with my nieces. Jana, a very vivacious eight year old, was very sad and angry.
“Why did Grandma die?” she asked. “Doesn’t she love us anymore?”
She could not understand why her grandma, who had held on until everyone had come in from Illinois, California, Connecticut, and Colorado, would abandon her. Jana sorely missed her.
I explained that Grandma’s body was all worn out, that it was very hard for her to stay alive when she was so old and so sick.
I said it was time for her to leave her body and go on to something else like a caterpillar in a chrysalis becomes a butterfly. “Would you want Grandma to stay the way she is, all sick and broken down, just because you don’t want her to go away?”
Jana’s face changed. Still serious, but now a little lighter, she asked, “Is Grandma a butterfly?”
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Views from the Bridge 