A Sanctuary Built on the Edge of the Dark

A letter for my grandparents

My grandma died a few days ago.

At least, in the literal sense of the word. The truth is she died almost four years ago when my grandpa died. Her contract with life ended. It's noticeable in photographs. Before she was giggly, smiley, her eyes alight. You could tell she was proud of who she was and what she’d done. Not bad for a farm girl from Oklahoma. Lawanna always said she’d never marry a dairyman. Yet she hadn’t been able to resist the charm of my grandfather when he swaggered into the Kingfisher town bank where she worked. She’d giggle when she talked about him coming into the bank every day to check his balance just for an excuse to see her. She was wearing pantyhose, was all my grandpa George would say, in his gruff way, with a little half smile.

She was alive while he was alive.

But when he died there was no after — not really.

Lawanna Christian fulfilled her purpose on this earth when my grandpa died. Dementia took hold almost immediately. Her happiness melted into irreconcilable grief. She told us to throw her in the coffin with George. Other times she asked why we couldn’t just keep his body in the basement. It didn’t matter whether it was this side of the earth or the other; she couldn’t seem to understand why she had to be separated from him.

When two people have been married for sixty years, maybe they are no longer two separate human beings. Every conversation, every argument, every sigh, every time your gaze touches, smooths away the hard edges separating your personhood from another. Your nerves open up to entangle with each other. Skin to skin. Mind to mind. Maybe there appears to be two bodies, but that’s just a perceptual illusion. They stopped being two a long time ago.

I should have been prepared for her to die. I shouldn’t have cried when they took her body away. The hospice nurse had told us it was happening. We were watching her oxygen go down. Yet still I had the sensation like maybe she wouldn’t have died if I hadn’t let my attention lapse. I felt my body wracked with terror, the feeling of an unknown unknown lurking in my blind spot, like maybe I’d forgotten something. Like maybe there was something I could’ve done. Maybe there was some kind of experimental dementia treatment we could’ve tried, from Brazil or Sweden. Scientists and doctors make medical breakthroughs all the time. Maybe there was something I could’ve said to heal her grief.

She’s gone. Is she really gone? Everything’s changed. Nothing’s changed. I am thrashing against the inevitable. Death has never felt real to me, no matter how much time has passed. Everyone I ever lost could walk through the door right now, smiling like they’ve just played a magician’s trick. I wouldn’t feel surprised. A living entity is being subsumed into memories. Is this what people talk about when they talk about trying to bargain with death? A moment passes. Another moment. She’s still dead. And each moment thereafter is seamless. There is no wound in time. There is no damage to mark the place where she left us. Everything is in its right place, no matter how much I can’t grasp the fact that she’s gone.

But I still feel like if I just look away, if I just change my perception a little bit, I’ll see her again. I’ll be back in my bed at the Christian farm, morning light glowing through white curtains, and she’ll call me for breakfast. I can hear the buzz of the early morning, the pop of bacon in the pan, the door to the garage opening, closing, as people come in and out of the house. My grandpa enters. He brings the scent of the farm with it, grassland mixed with manure. It’s a bright and heavy smell.

It’s the smell of home. Could I be back here? After all these years? I can still see it if I close my eyes. It runs through my mind, colors washed like watercolor. The farmhouse is thrumming. There are pancakes for me to eat, fresh milk from the cows for me to drink. Have you ever had raw milk? It tastes like it’s alive. It’s a milk that swirls with the taste of the world around it, its breaths and its sighs. My grandma is running here and there, doing fifteen things at once - answering the phone from the Christian cheese factory, feeding the kittens, making chocolate chip cookies and another batch of pancakes, just in case. My grandpa sits down to eat.

“How tall are you getting?” he asks me, and I groan because I’ve heard this joke a thousand times. And after some prodding, finally I answer.

“Huh. I didn’t know they could stack shit that high,” he says the punchline, in his gruff way, with a little half-smile. I laugh and roll my eyes and reach into his front pocket to steal his snuff. I run across the house with it, laughing, daring him to come after me.

There’s light shining across the pond and through the back door. It dances across the kitchen table. I feel it in the back of my mind now. It illuminates everything that comes before, and everything that will come after.

I open my eyes again and they’re gone.

For the first time in a long time, I’m standing alone in their kitchen. The house is quiet, almost in an apologetic way. It seems like it’s going to crumble under the weight of a foreign silence. The funeral home just came to take my grandma away and her caretakers left to get groceries and supplies to feed the animals. I can’t stop holding my breath.

I couldn’t bring myself to write about my grandpa when he died several years ago. I didn’t think I was a good enough writer. I didn’t know how to write about him in a way that was both honest and raw, that was loving without being simpering, truthful without being cruel. Everything I write turns dark. I’m the kind of woman who’ll notice the single rain cloud on the clear horizon, the dying worm on the sidewalk on a crisp summer day. I didn’t want my writing to drown my grandparents in the deluge of my crude sorrow.

And the truth is that I was ashamed of myself, of the way I’d seen them when I was younger. I imagined myself a worldly intellectual even though I’d barely stepped foot outside of Texas. I thought they were simple, narrow-minded. I couldn’t understand why they’d chosen a life without travel, without intellectualism, without ever exploring what was beyond the borders of their small slice of reality. They lived and died within just a few miles where they were born.

I cringe at the memory now, but I remember rolling my eyes when I went shopping with my grandpa at the United supermarket and he got excited that the bacon was on sale. How ignorant, I thought. This is all it takes to make you happy? I wouldn’t fall into that trap and be lured into a small world with small delights.

I thought I’d suffocate if I stayed in Oklahoma for the rest of my life. My blood burned inside me with the desire to see the world. I didn’t want to be crushed under the weight of its smallness. I wanted to be free.

Only after nearly fifteen years of “freedom” did I realize I’d sold myself a lie. There was nothing “out there” to see that was worth more than what my grandparents had built. There wasn’t a restaurant or a bar or a landscape or a job or a whirlwind romance or a balcony with a stunning view or a book launch party or a hit of acid or a flattering compliment about my beauty and genius from someone famous that could instill in me anything more than a fleeting sensation. After everything I’d done I still couldn’t fill a single cup with anything that mattered.

I got everything I ever asked for.

It just turned out I was asking for the wrong things.

I wanted to be entertained while I danced on the precipice of the Nothing. I pursued life like a shot of adrenochrome. I went so fast that it rattled my teeth. I nearly fell out of the back of my own head.

I had no idea what actually made life worth living.

My grandparents knew.

When I was younger I couldn’t understand why my grandma never allowed herself to sit down. Sometimes she’d work herself into a frenzy trying to make sure everything got done and I’d shout, “Grandma! Just relax!” She never learned how.

But I understand now. Love is not just a good feeling, and safety isn’t a thing you get to have for free. Love is a responsibility and a decree. It’s a sacred mission, and one that my grandparents undertook without looking back. Only when I didn’t have it anymore did I realize how much they’d done, to make sure we all had a place that felt like home. It was love manifesting as it was supposed to.

It’s easy to take home for granted. I never realized how rare it was, how much work it requires to uphold. And because of my grandparents, no matter how far I traveled from the farm, I still knew what home was supposed to feel like. They gave me the blueprint to aspire to.

I’ll be moving into my grandparent’s farm home now that they’re both dead. When I was younger they asked me if I wanted to live there, but I couldn’t imagine it for myself back then. I didn’t want to live out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but farmland and the winking dark gaps between stars.

But it's not nowhere is it?

It's the land that my grandparents saw for its potential, and constructed a home and a living out of the red Oklahoma dirt. It's the place where my grandparents raised two children and all the farmhands who came after that called them “mom” and “dad.” It's the place where they rode horses up and down the raised hills, crossing ancient buffalo wallows filled with green glass from old medicine bottles. It's the place where my grandpa found arrowheads that rose to the surface of the mud after the rain and saw UFOs zipping across the winking horizon. It's where my father found abandoned coyote pups in a den and raised one as his own. It's the place where my grandparents both died surrounded by people they loved. It’s the place where they made a something out of nothing.

It's the place I returned to again and again, until I learned to recognize the fact.

It’s my home.

It's a sanctuary built on the edge of the dark, and someone has to be there to keep the lights on.