My mother went in and grabbed the oxygen unit herself and pulled it down the hall, with the nurses now running after her. She got it into the room, only to find it was too late. So she spent the last brief minutes praying with my grandfather as he died.
I found all of that out later. When she called she just said he'd died, and she was coming home. It was a terrible snowy-icy night in March, and her knees were shaking all the way home. The brakes failed on the car coming down Chardin Road Hill, which is more like a mountain than a hill — a horrific thing to try to navigate without brakes! But somehow she made it down and made it home and when she got in, by then it was so late, we were all in bed.
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I heard her and got up. But all she said was "He's dead." She was still in shock. It was only in the days to come that the grief began to be expressed, and there was grief over so many things.
Grief is so complicated. My grandfather had died, and we knew he would die, but the way he died was hard to take. And our grief was filled, as it always is, with guilt — much guilt.
As usual, my mother had borne the burden for everyone. She was the one who had been there. She was the one who had to do everything. Why hadn't I been there? Why hadn't I gone with her? My grandmother was sick at home. But I was 21, young and strong and old enough to know I should have gone that day. If only I'd known how brief the time left to go had been. If only I'd done this or that or the other thing. And there were other kinds of regrets. If only I'd talked to my granfather more while he was alive. He had so much wisdom. He could have told me about the old country, the relatives, the roots of my own family. He could have told me about the old homestead in Westlake, the land he loved so much, his 53 years on the railroad.
All I knew about my grandfather was that he loved the land and trees and to sit in the evening and smoke his pipe and tell us German songs and poems. His favorite was: "You are like a flower, so bright and beautiful and good." He was a very quiet, patient man, though strong and stubborn in his own way. But I never talked with him much. I guess I thought he'd always be there.
Now, why do I tell you all this? This experience of grief in my own life. Well, I share it with you because I think in many ways our experiences with grief are all the same. We all go through the same stages of shock, denial and guilt.
First we say: "It couldn't happen."
Then we say: "It didn't happen."
Then we say: "Oh, if only I had . . . Oh, why didnt I. . . . do this or that?" We somehow feel responsible for everything. We take the whole thing on our heads. We even imagine we somehow could have leaped into the breech and changed everything, if only . . .
When an office-holder in Washington, DC died in 1917, a perennial office seeker hurried to the White House to tell President Woodrow Wilson that he would like to "take the deceased's place." The President answered, "If it's all right with the undertaker, it's all right with me."