Part 2 

Christmas Eve 2021

In the shop at the farm is a wooden desk that runs nearly from one end to the other. In the middle of the desk is grandpa’s drawer. In the drawer are the farm account books, or at least that’s where they were when I was small and he would stand over my shoulder and teach income and expenses, balance, and numbers. His work fingers pointed to small lines and figures that, at the time, meant nothing more than afternoons in his chair in front of a propane space heater bellowing warm air at my shins. While grandpa and uncle Marty worked on winter maintenance tasks I balanced the farm checkbook. The shop filled with the smell of tractor oil and propane gas from the heater. When gramps unplugged it to let the temperature level off the sound of WOBL golden oldies country music and his hum along to songs that were familiar and distant filled the shop air. 

He taped pictures in his drawer. School pictures of my brother and me chronologizing our lives up to graduation through thin scraps of tape attaching them to the sides. His great grandchildren’s school pictures were accruing along the sides now. Atop the tool bench desk is a host of work tools, scraps of paper, newspaper clippings, receipts, notepads with reminder scribbles, screws, nails, rubber washers, and other assortments of everything the local Farm and Home hardware arranges in neat rows. 

Gramps could be found on early summer days, when the rain gently sloped from the edges of the shop and draped along the freshly planted fields transforming them from waves of brown soil to velvet buds of green, in front of his drawer in his black, swivel chair with his Bible open on his lap. When he’s not working his boots are stored under his chair, and slung over the back of it is his black, carhartt vest. 

…

I can not just drive by the shop. A force compels me into the gravel drive and to the front of the building where my life from behind me unfolds, a blossoming of every moment that has led to this one, dismantling my heart and unraveling me into a pool of snot and tears. My boots crunch the gravel to the door. It’s cold inside. I duck under the torn apart Massey, a winter project waiting for him to come home. His boots are under his chair. His vest slung on the back. I collapse into his chair so hard it retreats from the force of my heartache and I swivel on the concrete. Burying my face into his smell, I grip the front of his vest with both hands, and break the silence of the shop with a wailing like that of a wild and anguished animal. 

November 25, 2021

    Thanksgiving has frequented my top favorite holidays since I was a little girl. Mom made an afternoon with us of bringing the china down, washing and polishing the silver, cutting up cubes of cheese for trays spilling with pickles and olives. Thanksgiving morning greeted Luke and me with the smell of apples and cinnamon simmering on the stove. We watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade while helping mom set the table with the fancy dishes that we only used one day a year.  “Your aunt Evy collected these one at a time,” mom would say, setting them in place. The dishes were pearl white china with silver rings haloing acorns tucked into delicate pine branches in the center. 

“These ones are mine,” my brother held one up to his face. 

“Not until you’re older,” mom reminded him, setting it carefully back in place. 

“You can have these ones,” I say. “I get grandma’s.” 

In grandma’s kitchen, grandpa built her a glass cupboard that hung from the ceiling above the dishwasher counter. She stored her china set, that our aunt Belle saved enough once or twice a year to order an additional piece until the set was full, in her glass cupboards. The light from the window above the sink caused them to gleam and bounce light fractures about her kitchen in the early morning hours. Her china was clear glass and each dish was framed in round, glass bubbles.

We had a mutual understanding, Luke and I. I got grandma’s china. He got grandma’s house. I got mom’s house. He got mom’s china. The day that we would be divvying up china and houses existed only as some distant, future realm, that didn’t really exist to us as children, and merely manifested in the occasional night lying awake in our beds weeping the small child’s cry over the fear that one day we would face a life that was filled with the absence of our grandparents and parents. 

Death was not something unfamiliar to us as children growing up on a farm. One of my earliest memories as a child includes butchering hogs. Grandpa had a small pistol he’d use to kill the animal by firing directly into its temple, and uncle Marty would slit its throat in one tug across its neck. It would spend the next hour or so draining blood into a five gallon bucket. Luke and I took turns carrying the bucket behind the barn to dump. Once the animal was drained we’d hang it, dip it in boiling water, shave it, commence to halving it, pull the intestines until there was nothing but bacon, ham, and pork chops to wrap and hand over to the Russians. This group of men, who drove out to Camden township from East Cleveland, sat on the tailgate of their ford rangers and watched us butcher, drinking vodka from handled jugs, with AK’s slung across their backs. 

    The first Thanksgiving without grandma uprooted our tradition from mom’s living room to grandma’s dining room.We usually spent this holiday with my dad’s side of the family, sort of as an annual reunion. They understood that since we lost grandma in October, mom was not prepared to host Thanksgiving separate from her dad and brother. The morning of Thanksgiving 2020 my husband smoked our turkey, a tradition we’d started two years ago, in year six of our marriage. Macy’s hosted no Thanksgiving Day parade to watch as we blended sweet potatoes and rolled croissants. In the afternoon we transported it all to grandpa’s house. We ate the next two Thanksgiving dinners on grandma’s porch telling stories about her and holidays past. 

Thanksgiving 2021 was the first holiday we’d achieved some small measure of normal as a family. We missed grandma terribly, and will until we’re reunited with her in Heaven, but we were able to tell stories with laughter, reference her and not drip with sorrow. The kids wrote the history of the first Thanksgiving into a play for us to enact for grandpa and uncle Marty. They sat in grandma’s ivory parlor chairs just outside the dining room clapping as we took turns emerging from behind a curtain that had the Mayflower roughly hand painted onto it. Finally we took final bows and retreated to the dining room for dessert. 

“I think I’m skipping out on pie,” uncle Marty said. Excusing himself into the living room to settle into grandpa’s reclining chair. 

“Are you feeling okay?” I follow him. 

My uncle was two years older than my mom. Born during the Kipton train crash and blizzard of 1960. There were so many injured in the Oberlin hospital my grandma had delivered him on a stretcher in a supply closet. “There was nowhere for us to go,” grandma always held both hands up in a ‘what are ya’ gonna do’ gesture when she told the story. “There was no medicine back then anyway,” she’d say. “So we just did what we had to do.” 

Two summers ago uncle Marty’s gallbladder had burst. Since then he’d had troubles keeping certain things down, other things gave him a significant amount of pain digesting. He leaned his head back against the headrest. 

“I don’t know, pumpkin,” he said. “All of a sudden I just got this sharp pain.” 

“Do you need a glass of water?” I ask.

“No, no, I’m alright, I’ve got some.” He said, shaking his head. 

November 27, 2021

There is always a difference in the voice of my mother when there is something not quite okay, and things may be terribly not okay, but her voice doesn’t reveal that much, only enough to forgo masking the truth that everything is not all okay. 

“Uncle Marty tested positive for covid this morning,” she says. 

“Oh God, oh no.” 

It had been one of our collective, greatest concerns: dad, Marty, or grandpa testing positive. They all had multiple preexisting conditions: dad and grandpa both had asthma, grandpa had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a decade earlier, and was 84. Marty was diabetic and didn’t have a gallbladder. After two years watching covid attack the placentas of women I loved who birthed stillborn babies as a result, and experiencing it attack the weakest and most vulnerable places in my body a year prior I felt my stomach twist and flip upside down. My fingers tightened their grip on the phone pressed against my cheek. 

“How’s he feeling?” I asked.

“Not too bad,” she said, her voice lighter from the release of the news she called to share.

“That’s good,” I say. 

“Yeah, we’ll keep an eye on it,” she paused, “just pray honey.” 

My throat thickens and my eyes sting. 

“I will.” I tell her. 

December 3, 2021

Dad started showing symptoms next. Mom said he was barely able to leave his chair after work. Somehow, just as he’s done all his life, he was rising at 3:50am, and leaving for work at 4:30. Arriving home at 3, and not leaving his chair until his alarm at 3:50. 

“I’m not sure that he’s even eaten much,” mom tells me. 

It is late, my kids are in bed. I look at my husband, frightened, with my phone pressed to my ear.

“What’s wrong?” He whispers.

I say into the phone, “I’m taking soup to grandpa and Marty tomorrow, I’ll make extra for dad.” 

“Thank you, honey.” She says. 

I tell my husband after hanging up that my dad has covid, and that he’s not doing well. 

“Oh no,” he says. “And he has asthma.” 

“I know.” I say. 

December 4, 2021

In the late afternoon I set out to deliver dinner to grandpa, uncle Marty, and dad. Grandpa tested positive a few days after Marty did, but he was feeling alright, he said, just tired. When I walked into the kitchen with their chicken soup Grandpa was sitting at the table bent over a plate of pancakes in his yellow, flannel button up. 

“Hi, gramps,” I smiled. 

“Hey, honey,” he put his fork down. 

Marty was sitting in the chair across from him. 

“I brought soup,” I tell them. 

“Soup sounds good,” Marty clapped his hands together. He was not eating pancakes, just sitting in his chair talking with gramps. 

“Good,” I say, uplifted by how normal everything seemed. 

“How are you feeling?” I ask grandpa. 

 “Just tired,” he says, “not too bad otherwise.” He patted his chest.

“Thank God,” I say. 

I calculate that if it were going to be a bad case it would have gotten worse by now, right? I ask myself. Definitely. I think. I was feeling like shrapnel within twelve hours when I tested positive. They were up and eating, and looked for all intents and purposes, normal. I ladle Marty out a bowl of soup. After chatting with them a few more minutes, I kiss gramps goodbye on the cheek, and tell him I love him. 

“Love you too,” he tells me. 

When I get to my parents’ house my dad is in his chair in the living room. A rerun of MASH is playing on their box television set. His feet, still in his boots, are wrapped in a blanket. His hands tucked into a hand towel. His face is turned away from me. He doesn’t stir when I come in. 

“Dad?” 

No response. 

“Dad,” I call louder. 

He is pale even in the dark, and I can’t discern the rise or fall of his chest. I’m frozen. Afraid to move closer. 

When I was a little girl, my mom would play a Disney Sing Along VHS video, and one of the songs, amidst “It’s a small world,” and “Country Bears,” was “Grim Grinning Ghosts.” As the musical number unfolds various Disney villains appear and dance throughout the song. I was always perilously frightened by that part of the tape. I would run behind the couch and yell for my dad to save me. He’d charge into the room and scoop me up, “daddy’s got you” he’d say, and he would wrap me up in his strong arms and pretend to battle the villains on the screen with an imaginary pirate sword to my utter delight. 

“Dad,” I nearly yell, begging him to respond. My throat is thick and I feel a cold sweat start to form along my spine. 

Finally, after three to four painstaking seconds more he turns his head weakly toward me. 

“Hi, sweetheart,” he manages to say, opening his eyes. 

“I brought you soup,” I say. 

“Thank you,” he yawns, “I’m not really hungry.” 

“I know, but you need to eat,” I tell him. 

“I’m just really, very tired. You know I worked all week.” 

It’s Sunday night. He hasn’t moved from this position in this chair since Friday when he came home.

“I know. Dad. You have to take off work.” I plead with him. “You have to rest.” 

“I haven’t taken a sick day in fifteen years.” 

“So, you’re overdue,” I say. “Please, promise me, at least through Wednesday. Please stay home.”

“I think if I can just sleep I’ll feel a lot better.”

“You will,” I say, “the fatigue is one of the worst parts, but you have to stay home to rest. Please stay home tomorrow.” 

“I’d do anything for you,” he says, his eyes close. 

“I know you would, dad,” I tell him, “please stay home. For me.” I add. 

“I’ll stay home tomorrow,” he finally concedes. 

“Promise?” 

“I promise,” he says. 

He’s already nodding back off to sleep. I kiss his cheek and tell him I’ve left soup in a bowl on the table. Driving away I pray it won’t be the last time I talk to my dad. 

Driving past my grandparents, their familiar presence and the immediate after sting of grandma’s absence adds to the turmoil in my heart. I begin to pray. I struggled in my walk with the Lord after losing grandma. It was so slow and so painful losing her. Each day, though I felt I was sinking beneath waves of worry, grief, and anger I knew the ground beneath my feet was solid. I knew that the joy within me was not a result of my circumstances, but a result of who I was in Christ. Even though I believed my sin was nailed to the cross, that I was eternally redeemed, still, I struggled to pray. But, parked once again in my weeping spot at the church where I first learned of salvation, I brought all my laments, and laid them at the feet of my God, because despite how abandoned and alone I felt, I know how much He cares for me. 

December 6, 2021

 I teach English at Lorain County Community College and every Tuesday and Thursday morning mom comes to get my girls at 11:45 so that I can get to my class on time. One day, I’ll resume my writing career, but teaching writing is a regular reminder of my first passion. This is finals week, and since my students submit an essay, we spend the final two hours eating Christmas treats and debriefing the semester behind us. It’s one of my favorite days of the year. I was finishing getting dressed when my phone rang. 

“Hi, honey,” mom said. 

“Hi, mama,” I reply. 

“Honey,” she clears her throat, “I’m so sorry to tell you this, but I’m not going to be able to make it this morning.”

I sit down on the bed, one leg tucked into my nylons, the other bare against our flannel quilt.

“He’s really gone downhill.” She tells me. “This morning his blood oxygen was 77, we’re on our way to the hospital.”

I learned, because of covid, that a blood oxygen level of 93 was low. 77 was dire. 

“Oh, God,” I say.

“I know.” She says

I can still vividly see her in the navy GMC, grandma’s final car, driving her to chemo. I can still see Gram reclining back in the passenger seat trying to hide her fear from us as we run along the drive waving, pretending to smile, wishing her a safe trip, and praying this appointment would go well. I see her face drawn in worry over the effects of that day’s treatment. Right now mom was driving toward the same hospital grandma never came home from. 

“Okay, that’s okay,” I tell her. 

“I’m so sorry about your class.” 

“No, don’t be, just please get him where he needs to be,” I tell her. My words catch in my throat betraying the panic bubbling up from a place already frenzied with grief inside me. 

“I will. Love you.”

“Love you too.” 

I unravel on the phone to my director. Between sobs I manage to tell her that my dad, my uncle, and my grandpa had all been fighting covid, that none of them were doing well, and my mom, who usually picks up my kids, was unable to today because of the covid and the blood oxygen levels and I’m nearly hyperventilating when she tells me to calm down. 

“I know your faith is strong,” she tells me. 

I did not feel strong. 

“Thank you,” I say. 

“And you know that when David fought Goliath, all he walked into that battle with was a stone and the faith that God would win it.”

“That’s right,” I agree. 

“Give this battle over to God. He’s the only one that can win it.” 

“Thank you,” I tell her. 

December 12, 2022

My dad began showing signs of improvement. He took off Monday from work after I’d begged him the night before. I’d asked him to take until Wednesday, but he said one day was enough, and he hadn’t wanted to even do that. 

“I promised you, baby.” He said to me later. “I’d do anything for you.”

Though I was annoyed he hadn’t taken more time off he said he woke up Tuesday and felt like going in. We were later told that, had he sat in his chair for the duration,  pneumonia would have settled into his lungs. If pneumonia had seized his asthmatic lungs, it could have been fatal. As long as he could stand it, it was best he was up and moving around. Though, it took months for him to appear back to normal.

My uncle, however, rapidly declined. I continued running food, vitamins, checking blood oxygen levels for my dad and uncle at home while mom sat with grandpa in the ICU. She was allowed two hours in the afternoon with him. He’d been placed on a ventilator, and had just completed five days of remdezeever. It was his blood oxygen they weren’t able to stabilize. It was holding a steady 93-94 on the ventilator but as soon as he came off it plummeted to the low 80’s. Covid patients show a certain level of covid numbers in the blood. If a treatment is effective the numbers of covid in the blood decline. After the first five day treatment the ICU doctors determined his levels hadn’t shown the improvement they hoped for. So they scheduled him for another five day round to start the next day. 

After hanging up the phone from a call with mom my heart feels heavy. I rub my temples with my fingertips. My three daughters are running back and forth between their bedrooms in our ranch style house past me to the living room. Their noise behind me blends into the static I feel filling my brain. It had been eight days since I’d seen my mom. We’d connected between texts and calls but each conversation was strained with the angst of another day passing that gramps wasn’t back in the garage, over Luke’s shoulder, working on the Massey. One of our farm tractors needed a new top end and the head replaced. He and Luke had just gotten it torn apart in the shop when, while walking from the shop to the house, gramps realized he couldn’t catch his breath. Luke had come alongside him, helping him get to the porch steps. Gramps sat down on a step, looked up at Luke, and said, “I’m in trouble.”  

Luke called to see if we had an extra humidifier. When he came to get it he was frantic in a way I’ve never seen. We were all becoming feral with worry. Every noise, every phone call, every text vibrate scattered our nerves and a wet, cold weight of worry brought us to shivering trembles if we were idle too long. As far as Luke and I knew, grandpa and the farm were a synonymous force. We were as wrapped up in our need for him as the ground was desperate for rain mid July. On late spring days, when the crops are all in, Gramps sits at his bench with his Bible in his lap just watching heaven rain on the newly budding soil. His presence there is as sure as the sun rising. It’s as certain as the seasons. It’s not something we’ve ever seriously considered losing. Not yet. Not like this.

My brother’s wife, Amber, and I set to researching homeopathic treatments that first night. We started a hydrogen peroxide therapy in cool mist humidifiers in gramps and Marty’s rooms. Luke and mom went to pick up pig ivermectin from a family friend who had a family member who took it and got better when they had covid. My best friend messaged me saying it was what helped her dad when he was sick with covid. Grandpa and Marty started taking it right away. It seemed to help initially. We had a blood oxygen reader because a member of our church who had just recovered from covid, drove it to us and left it on the porch when my dad first started showing symptoms. It read 77 on gramps the morning mom took him to the hospital after failing to catch his breath from walking to the house from the shop. 

“Honey,” my husband’s voice snaps me out of trying to examine every detail of the last eight days. My brain was frantically searching for any signs of hope and coming up empty. He moves across the kitchen to stand beside me and puts his fingers on top of mine, still pressing into my temples. He takes my fingers gently away from the sides of my head. 

“What did she say?” He asks. 

“It didn’t work,” my voice breaks loudly. 

“Mommy,” our oldest, always listening, “mommy, what’s wrong?” 

I don’t have any way to answer her. Everything. Everything is wrong. 

December 17, 2022

When I was a little girl my uncle had a video camera, one of those huge ones that propped up on your shoulder. My first Halloween that I was big enough to trick or treat, I’d just turned one in July, my mom drew a Jack o’ lantern face on an orange trash bag, and cut head and arm holes. There’s a video tape somewhere, buried in one of the empty bedrooms, of me coming to the door. My grandparents excitedly opened it with baskets full of candy to pour into my plastic, Sparkle grocery store candy bag, and pretended to be the most scared of me ever. I said “boo,” and they feigned shock and horror to my absolute delight. 

***

“Marty is not good.” Mom’s voice is tired. 

She has called for what has become our daily  “drive-home-from-the-hospital” update. 

“What does he need?” 

I can’t help but feel desperate. Why wasn’t God healing my family? Weren’t we faithful enough? I know that God’s love and sovereignty doesn’t work this way. I know He’s working all this for our good, but we’ve been through enough. A seed of frustration and anger takes root in my heart. We’d given zinc, vitamin D, elderberry, a hydrogen peroxide cool mist humidifier was running 24/7, he’d continued taking the pig ivermectin converted for a human ratio. Still, he had steadily declined. He hasn’t moved from his bed for four days, and his phone has been dead for all of them. Mom is sure it’s because he knows he’s going to die. I can’t even call him to check in. I have to go in a few times a day to make sure he’s breathing. 

“There’s nothing you can do,” mom said. 

“How’s grandpa?” I ask.

“He’s doing pretty good.” 

Grandpa had two more days of the second five day round of remdezeveer. His blood oxygen had been holding steady at 93-94 with the ventilator. But the forced air to his lungs was beginning to take a toll. The pleura, or the double layer of membranes that surrounds the lungs was beginning to dry up. Essentially, this double layer, the parietal (the outer layer) and the visceral (or inner) has liquid between that allows the outer and inner layer to slide along one another during respiration. This layer of liquid was beginning to dry up compromising his respiratory cycle. 

The day before the start of this second round I received a Facebook message from a friend who had just buried her brother as a result of covid. “Whatever you do,” the message began, “do not let them give your loved one Remdezeveer. It leads to kidney and liver failure, ultimately all his organs will shut down, and you’ll lose him.” 

I thanked her and offered my condolences. Then I called my mom. Mom assured me that the doctors were monitoring his kidneys, his liver, and that they were aware of the effects some covid patients had experienced because of the treatment. They weren’t worried about it being an issue. It was as variable as the effects of covid from one patient to another, they said. I hung up and prayed that grandpa wouldn’t be one of the patients that we shouldn’t have let them treat with Remdezeveer. 

Dec. 22, 2021

Marty began to slowly recover. Dad still needed help with some meals, some things weren’t tasting like he was used to, some foods were making him sick. Marty having any appetite at all gave us relief. Grandpa was able to withstand longer and longer periods of time without the ventilator and his blood oxygen was 88 this afternoon after he’d been off the machine for a few hours. He’d sat up in a chair that he’d walked to on his own, next to mom, and ate a full meal, she said. When I talked to her we both cried with relief. Friday morning he should be able to move to one of the assisted care facilities prepared to wean him off the oxygen, before coming home. We were in a waiting game, and he’d go where a bed opened, but based on the progress of some of the other patients there we were hopeful he’d get to move out of the ICU in just a few days. 

Dec. 24, 2021

On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I run. It’s a way to manage the anxiety I bear, a side effect of a 2014 PTSD diagnosis, and allows me a healthy means to manage my stress levels. I usually run anywhere from three to four miles. My run is peppier this morning. It’s Christmas Eve, grandpa is coming home soon, and Marty and dad are well into recovery. My family is still bleeding from the gouge grandma left, but the blessing of these healings will allow us to continue mending as we adjust to her absence. We’re a small family. My mom and dad married and I and then my brother were born, my uncle never married. The wound of the loss of a loved one is never insignificant, but when our every day consisted of one another it felt more like a hooked spear gouging us on the way in and ripping what was left on the way out. 

While I’m running my music and pace are interrupted by a text from my mom. Excited to learn when gramps is leaving the hospital I pause my run to read it.

Gramps has gone down hill. 

It’s up to you if you want to be here. 

I understand if you don’t. 

All of my thoughts stop. Before I know it I’m running from where the treadmill is in the basement, up to the shower. Shove on boots, jeans, flannel, still dripping water and hurry to my keys, “I have to go,” I choke words out to my husband passing him one way or the other. He holds me at the door. “Be careful.”  

I am as careful as I can be wailing into my steering wheel, peering out the windshield into an uncharacteristically warm Christmas Eve morning. 

The afternoon I drove to my grandparents’ after my grandma died was a beautiful, fall day. It seemed surreal to be shrouded in gray cloud grief when the world was aflame with a fall pallet of sunlit beauty all around me. The beauty of Ohio falls are a result of death. The beautiful colors and robust trees bearing thick red, orange, and yellow leaves are engaged in a process of dying. 

The words of old familiar hymns speak lyrical truth to my soul through my car speakers and aid and abet my grief stricken wailing. I’m reminded of King David pleading on behalf of his sick and dying son as I beg God to heal my grandpa. “Not like this,” I just keep saying, loudly pleading to the heavens beyond the roof of my car. “Please,” I cry, “not like this.” 

Fisher Titus hospital maternity ward and ICU floors share a wing and I park in a spot near the glass window covered first floor and hurry to the doors I’d waddled through twice to deliver our oldest and youngest daughter. Our middle daughter was born during our sojourn of ten years to Ashland county. Twice I walked into these doors for what would become the happiest memories of my life. I approach the building and levitate through the sliding doors. It felt like the glass window walls were shattering around me as those memories became fractured with the reflection of this one. 

My mom, uncle, and brother were seated in chairs near the elevator, away from the doors. My brother’s head was in his hands and from across the room I could see Marty crying. Mom seemed to be the only one holding it together. She stood up and hugged me. Internally, I was begging for her to say it had been a false alarm, that we were going to go sing some Christmas carols to him and head home. But, I knew. I knew by the fall of my brother’s shoulders, that he was too far beneath the surface to even look up at me, by the tissues my uncle, -still barely functioning, himself- who had driven here by himself when he should have been home resting, the tissues he was holding were drenched and well used. I knew by the deep breath mom released once I was seated next to my brother, on the blue, nearly plastic, waiting room loveseat and she was settled back into her blue, nearly plastic hospital waiting room chair. 

Over the course of the last 12 hours his organs had started failing. He was in complete liver failure, the kidneys were shutting down, and his lungs had dried to the point they’d never function on their own again.

I watch my mother’s mouth move to form and say these words.

 But, I am on the living room couch playing peek-a-boo over the back with my grandpa. He’d come with a box of Mike and Ike’s for me, and peeked over at me, waking me from nap time, smiling, and rattling them to get my attention. I am in his shop, in the winter, with the space heater warm on my legs while he hums a bluegrass hymn from beneath a tractor behind me. I am across a checkerboard from him, losing, he tells me where to move my next piece. I am in the driver seat of a dump truck, he’s pointing at the clutch and the break, “now, just let up real easy,” he says. I am beside him in our back row pew of Camden Baptist Church. I am walking with him in the cemetery, placing flags at veterans’ graves for Memorial Day, he is pointing at the graves of our family and neighbors, sharing their histories with me. I am in a tractor waving to him from across a field. I am on a softball field, and he is in the bleachers. 

I am on a blue plastic couch, in a hospital waiting room. 

“Either way he has, at best, two to three more days.” 

I gasp and cover my mouth. Luke, who had sat up beside me, crumples back into his hands. 

“I couldn’t make the decision alone,” she says. “But if he moves to end of life care we can all go be with him.” 

As an ICU patient only mom could be with him. I realize she’s saying if we move him to die, we can see him, and if we don’t, he’ll die anyway and we won’t get to see him. 

Mom and Marty go up the elevator together to sign the papers moving his room. Luke and I pace from the couch where, like small children we had taken turns crying into each other, to near the windows to call our spouses and update them. We each stood with one arm holding up a phone and the other around each other. It felt like if we let go we might fall off the edge of the earth. We were no longer right side up. 

Then we are in his room gathered around his ICU bed. Some of the hours I held his hand. Some Luke did, some Marty did, some mom did. We read from his Bible. It was one of the first things mom brought here three weeks ago for him. We sang hymns. There was joy in our grief. We knew as soon as he was absent from the body he would be present with the Lord. We knew that by grace he had been saved, through faith, and that he would open his eyes in paradise. Still, it was one of the worst days of our lives. The nurses appeared as apparitions meddling with his tubes, the beeps, and the heavy pulse in-and-out of the ventilator near his bed. 

Six hours later I am following behind my brother driving home. The sky mirrors our grief, paralleling the snuffing out of the sun, and looms ahead and behind us. 

I can not just drive past the shop. Compelled by agony I turn into the empty farm; it felt like dwelling among bones to be idle here. The earth bleeds flowing rivers of bitter water, they crash into my feet, dragging me toward the shop across decades of pebble, scattered moments rattling around my memory. I crash into his chair in front of his drawer, as a generation erodes beneath me, and Luke and I are propelled into roles the farm has laid in wait for us.

***

Once home, Travis draws me a warm bath. I can’t stop the shaking. He makes me hot cocoa. It is Christmas Eve and my children are small. But, even though the grief that has filled me could melt my bones, I don’t have to feign joy for them. On the car ride home, staring up at the gray sky, what I cried out to God caught me by surprise. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I repeated through my tears. Thank you for his life, thank you for giving us to him, thank you for bringing him home, thank you for the cross, thank you we’ll see him again. I used to lay awake at night and cry about this very moment. A world where our grandparents have lived and died. Then, when I was little, this day seemed as impossible as making the days between the years of my birthday pass quicker so that I could finally be old enough to drive a tractor on my own, then old enough to get my own car, then to leave for college, then to get married. I wanted to race through the days I thought would never end only to end up wishing I could experience just a moment from some of them one more time. You never see the end coming. One day I picked our oldest up to carry her on my hip for the last time. One day I nursed my last baby for the last time. One day their cries for me in the night stopped. I didn’t know they were the last time, but they were all the same. 

The memories with the people of our farm who instilled their love of God and country into us through the labor of their hands and by the sweat of their backs gave me fragments to cling to in moments of despair, glimmers that kept the faintest light burning in the darkest places. My husband’s skin smell and the warm caress of his hands along the skin of my back added to my pieces of hope. His beard, rough and forgiving, against the side of my neck when he wraps me in his arms and I let the heavy stresses I’ve bound inside me go in an exhale and return his embrace. The cries for mama in the depths of midnight and the stuttered breaths of our children as babies when I would pluck them from their bassinets, and nestle the crown of their head within the base of my neck, rocking them in the silence, sending prayers of gratitude to the God who gave them to me, these brought my life full circle and are those which will, even when I am old and at the edge of this temporal world, sustain me on toward the prize of Heaven. I will remember the smell of the truck cab and the newborn milky aroma of twilight motherhood. I will hear Gramps’ hum “The Old Rugged Cross,” deep from his chest, the same hum that he soothed me, my brother, and his great-grand babies with to sleep, nestled safely in his hands. I will embody the hope and faith my grandmother never lost in me and bequeath this to my children. I will see the velvet buds of soybeans shimmering brilliant green, the color of Travis’ eyes, decorating the rich brown soil in a ballet led by the wind as conductor, bending and commanding the bow of their leaves in an orchestra of majesty. 

***

 I used to think that Gramps’ blood must have dirt in it for how much time he spent out in the fields. 

“Faith and this land. Trust in God and this land has held this family together for eight generations.”

His voice is loud, over the rumble of the tractor engine. He is a deep brown, sun shade, in the middle of summer with a trucker hat on. We are driving toward the farm. Acres sprawl before us and gulls scatter at the roar of the engine. 

“Faith in God and this land.” He says.

Then he stands up while the tractor is still moving, and trades me spots on the fender so I can drive it the rest of the way back.