“Honey,” she replied, “these boobies fed your mother, and they made beautiful love to your grandfather for fifty-four years. I don’t need them anymore.”
Forget Keats, forget Emerson; this was one of the most poetic and beautiful things I have ever heard, and from a woman who’d never graduated from high school!
Just so you know, most people choose to die alone. When my grandmother passed, I was sitting in the dining room. My Uncle John, standing in her doorway, saw her leave her body and came to tell us. My mother recoiled and was adamant that she didn’t want to see her mother in that state, and in fact she didn’t want to leave the kitchen at all, so I immediately called my mother’s cousin Donny, owner of Pirro Brothers Funeral Home, and arranged everything. Sometimes when we’re adults, we need to allow our parents the opportunity to be children—we need to become the parent of our parent. Yes, it’s moments like these when it’s time for you to suck it up and take care of shit.
When the end came for my grandmother, I was a different person than I had been when my grandfather passed away sixteen years earlier. I had significant life experience and, more important, my belief system was in place. I’d lost several friends, had a couple abortions; I’d met The Mother, discovered Eastern meditation, and knew that death was not the end, but merely a snap, blink, and great transition—a leapfrog jump into the known of the unknown, if you know what I mean.
As I watched my cousin Donny’s men carry my grandmother out of the house in a splendid purple velvet body bag toward his new Mercedes hearse (being family, we got the VIP funeral treatment), I waved good-bye to her from the same window where she’d stood and waved good-bye to me for thirty years, tearing up each time like she’d never see me again. I remember that moment like it was yesterday.
It’s times like these when tribal life and ritual—these concepts that humanity, despite ten thousand years and countless different civilizations, religions, wars, and scientific advances, still holds on to, such as taking care of the dying and discarding our loved ones’ bodies—bestow teachings we simply can’t explain, not in English or even French or Sanskrit. People can write millions of books analyzing their ideas about life and death, but we can only talk around the most profound moments; we cannot speak of them. I didn’t know at the time that my mother would become a grandmother herself within a year, since I would soon get pregnant with Ava as I weathered my second divorce. But I did know, as my mother did also, that she was now next in line—that we’d all taken one more step down the plank.
I had the foresight to perform one last act of service for my grandmother. I marched over to the funeral home, where I demanded to meet the hair and makeup people and proceeded to terrorize them. “Do you hear me, no orange blush!” I insisted. “I do not want to see any teased hair!” You have to understand, in upstate New York you have to be very specific about this. I demanded a nice simple chignon. Then I brought fabric swatches to the funeral home to ensure my grandmother’s final look matched her coffin lining. At one point my husband, who had come up right after she died, took me aside.
“This is not a Vogue shoot,” he said.
“Oh, I agree,” I said. “This is something far more important. It’s my grandmother’s last visual moment on this planet, and I want to make sure she goes out looking great.”
S.O.U.L.: Sparks of Understanding and Love
I would like to tell you that my grandmother’s death was the last hard-hitting death I experienced, but it wasn’t. In 2010, I buried my father. I’d heard mixed reviews on what it was like to lose a parent. In yoga, to not have parents is to be free. But it’s still undeniably disconcerting to go back to the house you were raised in as you get older and see your parents with new eyes. When you’re young, your parents are everything: your government, your God, your food supply, your bank. Over time, they become actual complex and fallible human beings, which can seem very confusing and very Dada (pardon the pun). It’s almost as if the Wizard of Oz becomes the Lion or the Tin Man.
In the last years of his life, my father went from being the omnipotent, all-knowing Leland Level Blanding III, the person who took care of everything, to the person who needed taking care of himself. Instead of calling the shots, he was now getting them, from my mother, who did not take her marriage vows lightly. (Another word to the wise: you’d better be really nice to your partner when you’re young, because if you’re not, your later years will be hell!) But one thing I also realized at my father’s death is that people are people. We might call them mother, father, brother, sister, lover, husband, or enemy, but at the end everyone’s just a person, a fleeting incarnation of a soul that will someday disappear as suddenly as it arrived. One way to think of a soul is as a Spark of Understanding and Love.
All of us are sparks, and the whole global universe is a fireworks show. How does your spark manifest in the world? Is it progressive or effective? And what will it leave on this earth when it has moved on?
It could be a child, a company, a book, a piece of legislation you wrote, some other legacy of your creativity, or maybe just the granddaughter who grows up feeling loved and special because you took the time to call her every day. My father was one of six children. Placed in an orphanage at the age of nine, he was a noncompliant, bad-ass, truth-telling punk (sound familiar?).
