The plants were coming back to life outside, in the Wisconsin springtime, when Grandma Johnson died. I was at college, the end of my first year, but still in the same time zone, just on the other edge of Minnesota from her.
It was Uncle Fred who found her. He was my Mom’s uncle, Grandma’s brother-in-law. He stopped by to say hello. Grandma lived alone then, since Grandpa died a few years earlier.
It was her heart. She’d been taking her nitro pills for awhile for her angina. I’d wondered if those little pills she kept in a little metal tube would explode like dynamite, since I knew nitroglycerine was an explosive. She also gave up her room upstairs, sleeping in the corner of the living room. The stairs were too much for her.
He found her in her living room chair, with the TV still on. So many times we’d sat there together, munching green grapes or some popcorn, while watching “Jeopardy” or “the Walt Disney show”. I wonder still what the last show was that she had seen.
We’d also sat there quietly reading for hours at a time, indulging our bookworm tendencies with glee.
I don’t remember the last time I saw her alive. But I remember the last time I didn’t go see her. At Easter that year I stayed on campus instead of going home for break and I would have seen her then. Looking back, there are many reasons I wish I had gone home instead and seen her.
Her funeral was at the First Lutheran Church of Falun, which I had frequented when I stayed with her those many summers , school breaks and weekends of my life. It looked just like you’d imagine a small town church would look like from the movies. I still can picture the larger than life painting of Jesus, suspended in front, behind the altar. He was standing in a blue sky heaven, clouds billowing around him. His arms were opening to the sides, as though beckoning me closer for a hug.
Grandma’s body lay in the coffin, below Jesus. I didn’t approach, although everyone else seemed to. Finally Dad cornered me. “Aren’t you going to go say goodbye to your Grandma?”
“No Dad. That’s not her, just her body. She’s not here anymore. I want to remember her alive, not dead.”
“Well, just don’t say that to anyone one else around here.”
And I do remember her, almost forty years later. She still lives in me and my reading, my playing solitaire, my caring for plants, and my eating green grapes and popcorn, watching TV.
-Terra Rafael
