Things You Shouldn’t Do at the End of Your Life
Natalie Plahuta
Refuse an Ambulance
When my paternal grandmother felt sharp pains in her neck and shooting down her arm on December 20, 2020, she insisted she had slept wrong, causing a pinched nerve. In recent years, she had become a restless sleeper who woke up tired, sore, and grouchy, and who napped throughout the day to make up for the exhausting knots her body tied itself into at night. My grandfather, recognizing that, while pain in her neck was certainly a common occurrence, she had never been so much bothered by her arms, repeatedly suggested that they visit the hospital just a few miles down the road or call an ambulance. My grandmother, wary of a hospital visit in the midst of a pandemic, refused.
After hours of my grandmother denying her worsening condition, my grandfather ignored her assertions that she was fine and called an ambulance. Before the ambulance could cover the distance between their house and the hospital, my grandmother succumbed to a heart attack.
When my aunt met my grandfather at his house, having spent the day across town with her in-laws, she brought with her a fridge magnet that detailed the common symptoms of a heart attack in both men and women. The magnet depicted a figure, resembling those on the doors to restrooms, that was half man, half woman; little arrows pointed to places on the body where the male or female heart attack sufferer would experience pain respectively. Sure enough, a petite arrow attached to a dotted line pointed to the place where the neck and arm joined. Aunt Carrie stuck the magnet to the fridge at eye-level, though I didn’t understand who would be saved by the information now.
Ostracize Your Only Daughter
At the time of the heart attack, my dad’s twin sister, Carrie, had been at her in-laws’ house, across town from my grandparents’ house. However, neither my grandmother, her mother, nor my grandfather, her stepfather, knew that she was in Tampa. My Aunt Carrie had lied to my grandmother when she asked about her Christmas plans, saying that she and my Uncle Jon would be spending Christmas alone at their home in St. Louis, because she could not bear the idea of spending more than a day or two with her mother. My aunt had learned several years back that spending the holidays with her mother meant enduring snide comments and baseless criticisms during what should be the happiest time of year. Therefore, she frequently used the presence of my parents and myself at my grandparents’ house as an excuse to stay with her in-laws, the Mendozas, claiming that my grandparents’ house would be too full with her and Uncle Jon there. Then, she would visit for a tolerable period of a few hours during Christmas day, before retreating back to the casual, easy-going atmosphere at the Mendozas’ house.
The strain in my aunt’s relationship with my grandmother was not a new development. My dad had always been my grandmother’s favorite child, so she let him do as he pleased and never nagged him about his responsibilities. During their teenage years, my dad got to set fire to golf courses, while my aunt was expected to clean the entire house, a double standard that my aunt understandably grew to resent. Not only did my grandmother never criticize my dad, but she wouldn’t let anyone else criticize him either. In their senior year of high school, my aunt casually joked that her intended university, Marquette, was better than my dad’s intended university, UNC-Chapel Hill, and my grandmother, believing the joke to be in poor taste, slapped my aunt across the face in the middle of a campus tour. In response, my aunt shoved her and stomped away. I had never witnessed violence exchanged between my grandmother and my aunt in my lifetime, but the tension between them was palpable. Due to this strain, my parents and I understood my aunt’s motive for lying about her holiday plans, and we even aided in her lie by denying any knowledge of her Christmas itinerary.
Unfortunately, this lie became a bit of a predicament when my grandmother passed away five days prior to Christmas. On the afternoon of my grandmother’s death, my aunt called my dad to share the news and to ask for some advice. “Howard sounded so broken up when he called me,” she said, having been the first to speak to my grandfather. “He blames himself for not having called the ambulance sooner. I really don’t think he should spend the night alone, but I can’t just drive over there, can I? I mean, he doesn’t know I’m in town; I told Mom I wouldn’t be. I don’t know. Do you think I should?”
My dad had the call on speaker phone so my mom and I could listen, and without hesitation, I said, “Don’t tell him you’re in town. Look up flights that arrive in Tampa later tonight. Call him back; tell him you’re taking the first plane out of St. Louis. He’s not going to check to confirm your story.” Apparently, I am as prone to lying for convenience as my aunt is.
My mom didn’t hesitate either; she started looking up flights to Tampa on her phone. “There’s a flight arriving in Tampa around 9:20 p.m., so I’d say you could show up any time after that, and he wouldn’t really consider the commute time from the airport. Tell him you’ll rent a car so he won’t need to pick you up.” Honesty is not a virtue in my family, but committing to our lies is.
“Okay, okay,” said my aunt, sounding defeated, but a little calmer. I could hear the tears in her voice. “I’ll do that. In the meantime, I’ll call his priest to see if he can do a house call for Howard. I really don’t want him to be alone.” My aunt hung up, but promised to call back after she’d visited my grandfather.
Once the call ended, my parents walked to opposite parts of our house, and I sat on the stairs, following their forms with my eyes. My mom walked to the bathroom beyond the kitchen, and I heard her crying softly and blowing her nose. I wondered how she could have processed the news quickly enough to feel something already; I didn’t know how to feel just yet. After several minutes, I joined my dad in the living room, and we stared at the muted television in silence, watching Jonathan and Drew of Property Brothers tear down walls, processing the renovation as slowly as we were processing the death. Near the end of the episode, my dad said, “You can turn the volume back on if you want,” and I shrugged, keeping my arms crossed instead of reaching for the remote. My thoughts were loud enough as it was, and neither of us was really watching.
Forget to Label the Christmas Gifts
Since my grandmother passed five days before Christmas, my parents and I had already reserved a one-room cabin in Helen, Georgia for the holiday weekend. My parents and I had offered to drive down to Florida immediately to help my aunt and grandfather with the funeral arrangements, but Aunt Carrie assured us we should enjoy our vacation. Due to COVID-19’s ever-increasing death toll, particularly in Florida, it would be weeks before we could seize an available booking for a service. “Besides,” Aunt Carrie informed us, “Mom didn’t leave behind any final wishes, so we’re still debating what kind of service to have.”
Therefore, my parents and I embarked on our trip to Helen, a sleepy, mountain town that had fully committed to the aesthetic of a cozy German village. Over the course of three days, my parents and I slowly went stir crazy in a one-room cabin. For much of our stay, I had a migraine and laid ill in bed; my mother attempted to coax us into card games; and my father alternated between glaring at the television and yelling at my mother, which only worsened my migraine and caused her to cry in the bathroom. None of us talked about how we were feeling in response to my grandmother’s death, though I suspect the yelling was inspired by my father’s grief. Weighed down to the pillow by my throbbing skull, I stared blankly at the TV playing my father’s favorite true crime shows. I only hoped he wouldn’t fully succumb to cabin fever and chop my mother and me into little bits as a similar scenario played out on screen.
When we finally left Helen, Georgia and made our way down to my grandfather’s home in Wimauma, Florida, my aunt immediately put us to work. “There are eight closets in this house, and four of them are filled with her clothes,” she explained, “We need to start packing them up and donating them to GoodWill before Howard starts attaching emotional value to them.” My aunt, a military nurse, was almost cruelly efficient. It seemed, again, that there was no time for teary reminiscing or validating of feelings. We each shuffled off to separate closets to shove thousands upon thousands of dollars in clothes into trash bags.
Soon enough, Aunt Carrie called out to us in a voice that could only be described as giddy. “Oh my goodness! There’s a present in this closet. A wrapped present! Mom must have started wrapping presents for Christmas shortly before her death. There’s no label on it though; I wonder who it could be for.” My parents, my aunt, and I stared at each other, all curiously giddy despite the circumstances, until my aunt could no longer contain the question we’d silently been probing: “Who’s going to open it?”
After a short tournament of rock, paper, scissors, it was decided that my father would have the honor of opening the mystery gift. He peeled back the Grinch-green wrapping paper to reveal a blender, still within its box. “This very well could have been for us,” said my father, looking to my mother and shrugging, “I had mentioned that you had burned out the last one when you tried to blend up carrots.” Aunt Carrie agreed that the blender would best be left in their custody, and my parents placed the boxed blender tenderly beside their suitcases, a gift from beyond the grave. After further digging through my grandmother’s four closets, we found a Gryffindor mug, ostensibly for me, and a blouse in my aunt’s size but in a style she would never wear. With the belated Christmas presents in their rightful possessors’ hands, I suspect we all felt a tinge guilty that we hadn’t planned to be with her for Christmas in the first place.
Conceal a Chronic Health Issue from Your Loved Ones
The hospital released my grandmother’s health history to my grandfather following her death, but he didn’t have the heart to read it. My aunt, however, had no qualms about snooping through her mother’s health history, given her experience as a nurse. “Did you know Mom had heart disease?” She posed the question to my parents and me over lunch. “In her file, it said she was diagnosed with heart disease ten years ago, but I asked if she had any major health concerns just a few years ago, and she said she was in perfect health.”
“Well, we probably should have assumed she had heart disease,” said my father, “Didn’t her mother die of a heart attack at 53? It’s probably genetic.”
“I just don’t understand why she didn’t tell me,” said my aunt, clearly frustrated, “I could have helped her develop a healthier lifestyle, or I at least could have known to keep an eye on my own heart’s health if it does run in the family.”
While I understood Aunt Carrie’s disbelief regarding her mother’s secrets, I thought it made absolute sense. We weren’t exactly a sharing sort of family; we didn’t talk about any problems we thought we could manage ourselves. We don’t reveal our true feelings about anyone; we don’t explain our reasons for seeing therapists or marriage counselors; we don’t seek each other out when we feel the need to cry. Such interdependence would just complicate matters further. Why would my grandmother feel the need to tell us about her heart disease?
Expect Your Big Brother to Attend Your Funeral
The day after my parents and I arrived in Wimauma, a lovely bouquet of flowers arrived on my grandfather’s front stoop. The card attached read:
Howard,
Thinking of you.
-Wes
These were decidedly minimalist condolences, considering Wes was my grandmother’s older brother. When my aunt called Wes to see if he would be attending the interment service for my grandmother’s ashes, he informed us that he would be absent, as he and my grandmother had not spoken since she said that his wife’s lung cancer was her own fault, given that she had been a smoker for decades. This comment coming from a woman who didn’t quit smoking until I was thirteen. When I was a child, she often made me sit on her lap as she told me stories of her trips abroad and exhaled smoke into my face with every sentence, and I held my breath as long as possible, refusing to inhale the sour fumes. Clearly, Wes couldn’t find humor in the irony of her comment.
If my grandmother had known of Wes’s refusal to attend prior to her death, I think a broken heart would have killed her before a heart attack could. My grandmother had always idolized Wes. Having grown up in a military family, she considered Brigadier General Wesley Taylor the epitome of everything she valued, and she was proud to have him as her older brother. Even as she said cruel things about his wife, she could never say anything less than positive about him. My grandmother would have moved earth and sky to attend his funeral if he had gone first, and I think it would have killed her all over again to learn that he wouldn’t do the same for her.
It seemed my grandmother had not been very likeable at the end of her life, as numerous other family members reported that they would be boycotting the funeral. My grandfather’s sisters told us directly that they had never gotten along with my grandmother and that they suspected the feeling had been mutual. I admired their ability to express their feelings honestly, something neither my parents nor I had succeeded in yet, but I wished they had done the polite thing and said the pandemic had made travel too difficult to attend the service. Isn’t there some kind of rule about speaking ill of the dead?
My family and I, for our part, spent the evenings sharing stories of my grandmother in as neutral a tone as we could, transforming her cruelty into comedy and finding humor in her harshness. We granted her metamorphosis in death rather than choosing Wes’s method of refusing to acknowledge her altogether.
Interrupt Your Husband’s Stories
Three Christmases prior to the year my grandmother died, when I was 18, she insisted that we bake cookies together, and I eagerly latched onto this potential bonding opportunity with a woman who shared so little about herself. “Good. Wake up at seven in the morning, and we’ll start baking.”
I frowned, usually preferring to rise in the late morning. “Must we start so early?”
“Yes, there’s no other time to bake cookies. I’ll have to make lunch once we’re done,” she explained, seeming offended that I had the audacity to question her suggested baking schedule. I relented, scurrying off to bed and setting an alarm for seven in the morning.
When I awoke, I found my grandmother awake in the kitchen, looking very tired. She sneered at me, “Oh, you’re finally awake, huh?” I checked the clock on the microwave to confirm I had woken up at the agreed upon time; the time read 7:00 AM, leaving me to ponder over the harsh greeting. Then, she shoved a bowl into my hands. “Here’s the dough. Make sure to roll it out, and then, use the cookie cutters,” she explained, pointing to silver snowmen, Christmas trees, and gingerbread men on the kitchen counter. “Don’t waste any dough,” she said with grave finality. “I’ll know if you do.” Then, she walked over to the couch in the next room and laid down to sleep.
I gawked at her sleeping form, clutching the dough in my hands and feeling like I could use a nap myself. Had she really insisted that I wake up so early to bake with her, only to abandon me to complete the task alone? I began rolling out the dough, feeling miserable. Between this rejection and my grandmother’s comment from the day before that my acceptance to UNC-Wilmington wasn’t worth celebrating because “they let anyone in there,” I was beginning to feel as if my presence was merely an annoying holiday formality she was forced to endure.
As I was sliding the first two baking sheets of cookies into the oven, with much more dough remaining, my grandfather walked into the kitchen and took a seat at the table. “Well, Natalie, you look hard at work,” he announced.
I mustered a weak smile. “I’m hoping that these cookies will last us longer than the previous batch.”
My grandfather chuckled. “Well, how about a story while you work? Did I ever tell you about the time I attended Harry Truman’s funeral?”
I raised an eyebrow, looking away from the dough entirely and focusing my attention solely on him. “No, how did that happen?”
“Well, I was taking a professional development course with the army, and whenever someone of importance died, each branch of the military sent representatives to the funeral to pay their respects. Since this was right around Christmas, I was one of the few people in the course available to travel to Missouri for the funeral, so my higher-ups gave me instructions regarding where to purchase some nice, white gloves and where to rent a black car. Then, I was told to invite and escort a lawyer, ostensibly someone close to Mr. Truman, to the funeral. Now, my higher-ups told me to be absolutely certain that I handed the invitation to the right individual because they didn’t want just any random joe wandering around at the funeral, so when I met the lawyer at his office, I said, ‘Sir, if you wouldn’t mind, I’ve been told to confirm the identity of the person I hand this invitation to, so could I please see some identification?’ Well, the lawyer dug around in his filing cabinet for a few minutes and then said ‘Will this do?’ as he handed me a document. I looked down at the paper, and I’ll be, it was his discharge papers, signed by Captain Harry Truman himself.” My grandfather paused his story to chuckle. “I said, ‘Yes, sir, that’s good enough for me.’”
Before my grandfather could continue with his story, my grandmother bellowed from the living room, “Howard! She doesn’t want to hear your stories! Leave her to her baking!”
My grandfather looked down, rubbing his beard. “Well, I won’t bore you any longer. I should go take my insulin anyway,” he said, standing up and walking back to his room before I could even hear about the actual funeral. I stood there, in front of the oven, feeling more miserable than before. Not only was my grandmother refusing to spend time with me, but she was actively scaring off my grandfather too. My grandmother’s icy inclination was keeping our relationship frozen at a halt, preventing me from truly getting to know her or my grandfather. The best I could do that Christmas was coast through the holidays and nod politely whenever she addressed me.
Stop Visiting the Manatees
In the years preceding my senior year of high school, my grandmother and I could at least see eye to eye on our love for nature and wildlife. Just twenty minutes from her home in Wimauma, there was a manatee viewing center and sanctuary, where manatees gathered in the warm waters heated by Big Bend Power Station. Thousands of manatees migrated to the discharge canal at Apollo Beach during the winter months to escape the cold, open waters of Tampa Bay, and since boat traffic was banned in the sanctuary, the manatees were not only warm, but safe too. Therefore, whenever my parents and I visited for Christmas, my grandmother would take us to visit the manatees, and we would watch the manatees play with buoys and would coo at babies huddled close to their mothers, attempting to distinguish snout from back from flipper.
During my first year of high school, my grandmother adopted a manatee on my behalf. Obviously, this was an honorary adoption, as I didn’t have a manatee living in my bathtub at any point in my life, but the money spent on the adoption certificate went toward maintaining the sanctuary and treating injured or orphaned manatees found in the wild. The certificate included a picture of my “adopted” manatee, the manatee’s name, and some rudimentary biographical information, including the manatee’s sex, estimated age, markings, and recent sightings. My manatee was named Flicker, written on the certificate in an all caps, sans serif font that initially made me think the manatee’s name was FUCKER. The manatee, a female, had received candle-shaped scars from a boating accident, thus serving as the inspiration for her name. Following the adoption, my grandmother and I would scour the waters of the sanctuary together for any sign of Flicker, but we never saw her. We hoped that she had simply found another sanctuary to visit in the winters and hadn’t perished.
When I was not in Florida, my grandmother mailed clippings of manatees and Sandhill cranes that had made appearances in the local newspaper. Occasionally, I would receive news stories about gators that the local animal control had to capture before they could make a meal out of someone’s pets. My grandmother and I continued our correspondence of animal-related images for years. I made her manatee-themed Christmas cards when the holidays arrived, and she even sent me a condolence card when Snooty, the world’s oldest manatee, died in captivity. But, as I approached college, she seemed to lose interest in the one delight we shared. She stopped visiting the Manatee Viewing Center with me during my senior year of high school, so she didn’t get to see the new developments at the sanctuary, such as the sculpture garden and the above-ground pool for stingrays. She stopped engaging with the wildlife, and I lost the ability to engage her in any conversation at all.
In the week leading up to my grandmother’s funeral, my parents, my aunt, and I visited the Manatee Viewing Center after donating a carload of my grandmother’s clothes to a boutique in Apollo Beach. As we looked at the slick, grey forms bobbing in the water, the three adults in their late forties began to contemplate why my grandmother would ever stop visiting this place. “This may be awful to say,” said Aunt Carrie, “but I think it was her time to go. She had lost interest in everything; she didn’t enjoy anything anymore.”
My mom joined in, “I just don’t understand when she became so bitter. I mean, she was so involved with the community when Howard was in the military. Did the move to Florida make her feel isolated?”
“No, she was bitter before that,” my dad responded.
“She loved the status and culture of being an officer’s wife,” Aunt Carrie contributed. “Did she just go on a downward spiral once Howard retired and she lost that status? That would have been, what, thirty years ago?”
“It didn’t happen immediately though,” my dad countered, rubbing his forehead. “Must have been around twenty years ago that she started feeling unhappy, around the time Natalie was born.”
“I guess she felt like no one really needed her anymore,” my mother mused. “You’d both grown up and moved on; she didn’t have to make Howard look good to his superiors anymore. She’d lost her purpose. But still, to spend nearly a third of your life without purpose…” she trailed off, and we knew what she meant.
I stared out at the grey snouts poking through the tide, mist spraying from gaping nostrils. In hindsight, I suppose it did seem as if we didn’t need her. My parents and my aunt all had good jobs; my parents had no trouble raising me; and I had five grandparents beyond her since my dad’s father had also remarried. None of us had any absence of love or order that she could fill. I wish I had told her that, even if I didn’t necessarily need another grandparent, I wanted to connect with her. If I had, maybe she’d still be visiting the manatees with me.
Hide the Safety Deposit Box Key from Your Spouse
Since my father is an accountant, my grandfather asked him to visit the bank with him so he could begin the process of settling my grandmother’s finances. While speaking with a bank representative burdened with the first name Stalin, it came to light that my grandmother had opened an account of her own in addition to the account she shared with my grandfather. Aunt Carrie and I hypothesized that setting aside money for herself may have been second nature after her first husband cheated on her and left her for the other woman, but the bank account only contained $200 or so, which wouldn’t have gotten her very far had she needed an escape plan. The financial discussion with Stalin also made my grandfather realize that he had no idea where the key to the shared safety deposit box was, as it had been left in my grandmother’s care.
Therefore, as soon as my father and grandfather returned from the bank, we sprung into action, searching ardently for the key. It wasn’t in the safe, in the office, or in her jewelry boxes; we were running out of obvious options, so I had to start thinking more creatively. As someone who plans escape routes for every date, I began thinking like a scorned woman, someone who may need to slip out in the dark of night and never return, someone with secrets. Where would I hide things if I needed to escape at a moment’s notice, grabbing the essentials as I make constant progress toward the door?
I began looking in the vases positioned throughout the house and started to understand why my grandmother only had $200 in her private savings account. In each vase, I found a new stash of money; $200 here, $200 there, all leading from the bedroom she shared with my grandfather to the front door. When I had investigated all of the vases and handed the money over to my grandfather, I circled back to the master bedroom and retraced my steps, still wondering where the key could be.
I began searching in vase-adjacent household items such as teapots, cookie jars, and umbrella stands, but to no avail. Finally, I spotted a water pitcher in the kitchen, positioned between two overflowing flowerpots, and I stared down into its depths. A small, bronze key glinted at the bottom, and I pulled it out, victorious. Handing the key over to my grandfather, I realized just how little my grandmother felt she could trust others. Maybe that’s why others found her so disagreeable following her first marriage, but what did that say about me if I could so accurately put myself in her own exit prep mindset?
I suppose I share an ingrained distrust of men with my grandmother. Although I’m able to trust family members and close friends, I’ve been on enough uncomfortable dates and have attempted to make myself invisible in the presence of angry, irrational men enough times to know I should never leave my resources, my decisions, or my freedom to a man. On dates, I never let the other person drive me around, never let them pay for me, and never give them my address. I insist on my own autonomy, on my ability to leave as soon as things turn less than pleasant. Because of this experience, I understand my grandmother’s inability to completely trust her second husband and her need for an escape plan, but I wish she hadn’t allowed one failed marriage to emotionally isolate her from everyone. I wish she had opened up more to her children and me and had spoken more freely with us. It’s unnerving to think that I could end up the same way. Maybe my parents and I can learn to do what she never did and open up to each other; I feel that I can trust them at least.
Expect Your Husband to Die First
My grandmother was ten years younger than my grandfather, and both of them expected my grandfather to pass away first. My grandfather had already begun preparing his will, with my grandmother as the sole inheritor. Because of this, I suppose my grandmother never felt the need to organize her own will until she could account for what she would inherit from my grandfather. When my grandmother’s heart attack took her from us, she had neither a will nor funerary wishes outlined, so we simply arranged to have her cremated, assuming she would want to be interred with my grandfather.
Twenty minutes before we had to leave for the interment service, my grandfather sat down to lunch, and my parents, my aunt, and I got changed into our funeral attire. My grandfather had a blond dog that constantly craved attention and shed on anything he touched, so the goal was to get dressed as last minute as possible to avoid his light hair ruining our black clothes. Even in the remaining fifteen minutes after I got dressed, I had to push Gamer, the dog, away from me and hold him at arm’s length. It wasn’t until we were all black-clad and huddled by the exit, waiting for my grandfather to finish off his Chinese leftovers, that we even considered the whereabouts of my grandmother’s ashes. “Oh yeah, I guess we can’t go to the funeral without the guest of honor,” my aunt laughed. “Howard,” she yelled, so my grandfather could hear, “They’ve got Mom’s ashes at the funeral home, right? Did you pick out an urn or anything?”
“Your mother? No, she’s here. She’s in the closet,” replied my grandfather, as if ashes maintained their human identity and had the autonomy to choose their location.
Then, my parents, my aunt, and I all looked at each other, telepathically communicating the same horrified question. Which closet? We had been digging through closets for the past two days; surely the urn would have turned up by now.
For a moment, my aunt looked crazed, “Shit, I wish he had told us that sooner!” she hissed. “I’ve been opening every single package and container I came across in the closets. What if I had opened up the wrong container and inhaled Mom or something?” Her eyes roamed nervously around the room, and she tugged on the sleeves of her dress.
“Well, I’m sure she’s in an urn or something, so we certainly would have noticed that and refrained from opening it,” my mom reassured her. “Besides, we didn’t check the linen closets or Howard’s closets. Maybe she’s in there.” It seemed we were all personifying ashes now. At least, that way, it kind of felt like hide and seek. Where’s grandma? Not in the guest bedroom closet. Oh, you little trickster, where could you be?
We decided to divide and conquer. My mother searched the linen closet near my grandfather’s office; I searched my grandfather’s closet in the foyer; my aunt searched the linen closet near the dining room; and my dad searched my grandfather’s closet attached to the master bedroom. Upon opening the door to my assigned closet, I couldn’t help but whisper, “Grandma, are you in here? It’s so comforting to have another family member in the closet, don’t you think?” But I found no urn staring back at me and no grandmother to reciprocate my mirth. We all came up short. By that time, my uncle had pulled into the driveway and had texted my aunt that he had arrived with flowers for the service. It was mere minutes until we had to leave for the funeral home, located an hour away in Sarasota.
My aunt was clearly starting to panic, “Oh god. Oh my god,” she hissed, “It’s going to be so fucked up if we can’t bring Mom to her own funeral because we lost her.” Just then, my grandfather walked into the foyer, where we were wracking our brains for what to do. “Howard,” my aunt confessed, “We can’t find Mom. We checked all the closets, but saw no urn.”
In response, my grandfather nodded and walked to the linen closet my mom had searched. He rummaged among the sheets and towels until he came across a navy blue bundle. When he turned to face all of us, he held what appeared to be a box wrapped in a United Airlines blanket. My parents, my aunt, and I all shared a look that could only be translated as I have so many questions. Apparently, United Airlines is happy to serve its customers even in their final passage.
My grandfather removed the blanket to reveal a small, grey carton. The label on the carton bared my grandmother’s name and the date of cremation. He handed the carton to Aunt Carrie and wandered off to walk the dogs. My parents left with him so my mom could retrieve her purse and my dad could grab his blazer. My aunt and I, now alone with Grandma, stared at the carton. “So…do we think there is an urn inside of this box? It seems too small for that,” said my aunt, awkwardly patting the carton.
“Well, they don’t put all of the ashes produced by the cremation process in the urn, just a couple handfuls,” I explained, trying to wrap my head around my grandmother’s newest manifestation.
“I’m going to check,” said Aunt Carrie.
“Check what? To see if there’s an urn?” I asked.
“Yeah. Surely, Howard isn’t just letting her get interred in a plain grey box,” she said. I watched as she delicately lifted the lid with a slight scrape of cardboard. I watched as she stared down into the box, standing just far enough away that I couldn’t see. Finally, I watched as she quietly tucked the lid back into place, her expression unchanged. “Don’t open the box,” she explained simply, and I knew what she meant.
Later, Aunt Carrie told me that the carton contained nothing more than a vacuum-sealed bag of my grandmother’s ashes. It seemed strange to me that my grandmother, who purchased fine designer clothes, traveled on luxury cruise ships, and bought fine art to decorate her home, was put to rest utterly unadorned.
Remind Others How Much You Love Your Granddaughter Before You Ever Tell Her the Same Directly
Eight people attended the interment service for my grandmother’s ashes. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, a maximum of twenty people were allowed to attend, but my grandmother seemed to have burned bridges with everyone but my grandfather, my aunt, my aunt’s husband and in-laws, my parents, and myself. Technically, nine people attended my grandmother’s funeral, as a funeral director stood at the edge of the service for its duration, and I’m quite certain he had never seen such an awkward group of mourners.
My grandmother had offended us all at one point in time, but never enough to completely burn bridges with us. She had screamed at my grandfather on numerous occasions and never apologized; she had made snide comments regarding my weight, my aunt’s weight, and my mother’s weight; she had implied my uncle and my mother weren’t good enough for her children; she had told me I’d never make a career out of an English degree; and she had slapped my aunt across the face. Therefore, while we were all mourning her death internally, our memories of her were conflicted enough that we were all hesitant to give a eulogy or sing her praises. I even declined to speak when my grandfather extended the opportunity to me. I wanted to be a dutiful granddaughter who reflected on all the ways she looked up to her grandmother, but my tongue was tied by so much bad blood, and all the sentimental clichés I had heard in movies tasted false in my mouth.
Fortunately, my mother, the most loquacious member of the family, was able to recall some pleasant memories from when she met my grandmother around the time my parents first dated in high school, before my grandmother became bitter and jaded in her old age. She spoke of my grandmother’s wit, recalling a time when my grandmother walked in on her and my father making out in my father’s childhood home. “It was so funny,” my mother recounted, “She was cool as a cucumber as she said, ‘Amy, your mother is on the phone. Should I tell her you’re busy?’ with all the mirth of someone half her age.” My mother also spoke of my grandmother’s sincerity. When my mother began having suicidal thoughts in college and my father didn’t know how to address the situation, he went to my grandmother for help, who reached out to my mother’s parents to let them know she needed extra support and who extended her own support. “In a way, she saved my life,” said my mother.
Aunt Carrie must have felt encouraged by my mother’s taking the initiative because she offered to speak next. She chose to reflect on my grandmother’s immense pride, a trait that I had often reflected on negatively in the past. Aunt Carrie, however, chose to highlight the positive outcomes of my grandmother’s pride, such as how her pride in gardening resulted in dedicated projects with the Master Gardeners’ Club or how her pride in her husband’s military career inspired her to be an excellent hostess to my grandfather’s commanding officers. “Most of all,” my aunt concluded, “Mom was proud of her granddaughter. She was so proud that Natalie was pursuing an English degree, just as she had, and she was overjoyed that she had someone to talk to about literature.” Then, she looked directly at me. “I’m sure she would have supported you through every year of your MFA program had she lived long enough to see your graduation. She loved you so much.”
I wanted to feel something. I wanted to be moved in the way this was supposed to move me. But I was just confused. My grandmother had never talked to me about literature, even though I knew she had obtained a master’s degree in the field. Whenever she had asked me about my academic or professional goals in the past, it was usually with the purpose of entrapping me into a lecture about the futility of pursuing an English degree. “I majored in English, and all that got me was a job as a substitute teacher,” she’d say as the basis for her argument, even though she was working at a time when women were just starting to enter the workforce with regularity, a time that never saw the wide array of jobs that exist today. How could she have been proud of the very thing she had discouraged? How could she have been proud of me? I had heard her tell my grandfather’s siblings that she was proud of me, but I had assumed she said this in an effort to gloat my superiority over their grandchildren, as she never affirmed me directly. Even the concept of her loving me seemed somewhat foreign, as I rarely heard the words “I love you” from my grandmother while she was sober. I had heard “you’re my favorite,” but this seemed a given, considering I was the only grandchild produced from her own children rather than her stepchildren. I just wished she had told me herself what my aunt was telling me now. How much better could our relationship have been if she had just communicated her affection directly? How much more readily would I have accepted my aunt’s claims?
Maybe my grandmother thought, in our family’s typical fashion, that she didn’t need to speak directly about her feelings. Maybe she thought I would be able to intuit her pride in me and her love for me. We were apparently so much alike, after all, that I should have picked up on the signs. Like her, I can be proud, witty, and sincere. At my worst, I can be stubborn, secretive, slow to trust, and rash with my words, as she was. The emotional chasm between us had been growing between us for years leading up to her death, even as I continued to visit her, so I had already felt her absence by the time of her death. But, as I began to relearn my grandmother through the remnants left behind after her death and reflect on the stories shared by my aunt and mother, I began to realize that I had lost someone who was possibly just like me many decades ago. And that insight made me sad for having not known her well and made me worried for what I may become, in a sense, making me feel a kind of loss for both past and future.
Natalie Plahuta is in her third year of pursuing her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at George Mason University, where she is the Nonfiction Editor for the intersectional feminist literary journal So To Speak. In 2020, she graduated with her Bachelor’s in English and a minor in Asian Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill. In 2018, she won the first prize for poetry in the Cynthia DeFord Adams Literary Contest. Furthermore, her fiction “The Sounds of the Dead” is forthcoming in The Other Folk’s Fables for the Dying series. Although she currently resides in Northern Virginia, Natalie frequently visits her home in Raleigh, North Carolina.