Mountains and Ravines

Death Lesson

One's first glance at death is a rite of passage of sorts. Looking into the cold unmoving face of someone who used to have life in them is a troubling, but necessary part of maturing. It awakens a universally known truth that all humans have resting inside themselves. Unknowingly, we carry it around within our bones. No one lives forever. God doesn't care if you hate the person He wants to take or if you love them, need them. God takes what He wants. After all, He was the one to give that life in the first place. God is simply reclaiming what He has lent. The fact that no one lives forever was awakened in me at the age of eight.

Drew Barrymore once said, "I am not someone who is ashamed of my past. I'm actually really proud. I know I made a lot of mistakes, but they, in turn, were my life lessons." As children we are not taught how to live life solely by our parents or teachers. We are also taught how to live by life itself. My childhood was different though. The biggest lesson I ever learned was not taught to me by life, but instead by death. This isn't a story about a life lesson. No, what I learned when I was nine was a Death Lesson.

I was wearing shorts and a thin pink shirt. Birds were flying to their nests and the first blinking lights of fireflies began to illuminate the sky along with a handful of stars. It was late June and so far the summer had gone by uneventfully. At the time we had a swimming pool in our back yard and many afternoons were spent splashing in the cool water with my brother and sisters. Evenings were spent running around catching bugs and playing games on the hammock. I would sit outside in the fresh tasting air and look at the flowers. I would lay with my stomach pressed flat to the ground and spend hours reading. I would sit on the stones in my father's garden and drink the metallic tasting water that came out of the garden hose as he tended to the sweet tasting cherry tomatoes that I loved to eat. My whole life had felt like the perfect summer day, but that day, the day I first saw death, was different.

It had been especially hot and after asking my mom roughly seven times if I could watch TV, she reluctantly agreed. I flopped onto my parent's bed, worn out from the humid weather that made my short hair, which was pooling around my ears, curl up at the ends. I heard the phone ring in the kitchen, but I didn't pay much mind to it as I flipped to a cartoon. A few minutes later my mom came walking into her room. The expression on her face was filled with worry. I scrunched my eyebrows in confusion as she sat me down on the bed and told me that my grandfather was dead. Her face was pale and she had the expression of a person standing at the top of a cliff on a windy day. I looked back at her and cried. Tears stained my flushed checks as I crawled onto her lap and sobbed. I sobbed with everything I had in me as my mother cried softly. I was so sad that my mother was upset. I cried not for my grandfather's death, but for my mother's sorrow. The only thought that crossed my mind about my grandfather as I sat curled up in my mother's lap was that I was glad he was gone.

My grandfather had always scared me. His sunken eyes and the way he always was chewing gum despite the fact that he had only a few teeth made me squirm. He would grind the chewing gum with his gums and when he was done he'd stick it on his bedpost and let it harden there. Indents of the few teeth he had were trapped forever in the hardened gum fossils that covered his bed. He was tall. I remember that; tall, thin, and covered in sores and whiskers. He reminded me of those old witches with pointy hats and broomsticks. At the age of eight I didn't care that he loved me. He looked scary and that was all that registered.

After my parents told my siblings, I thought back to the last time I saw my grandfather alive. It was Easter, the smell of chocolate and honey glazed ham tickled my nose as I sat cross-legged on the floor a fistful of red playing cards clenched tightly in my hands. My cousins sat in a circle around me as I lazily lifted my eyes from my cards and looked to my grandfather. He was sitting in the kitchen a magazine laying on top of his sprawling legs. His back was hunched and his thin white hair moved slowly as a large box fan whirled behind him. My dad called me to go and as I neared the door, he stopped me and bent down and whispered in my ear, "Give your grandpa a hug." My dad smiles with a twinkle in his pale blue eyes. Shakely, I walked over to my grandfather. He smiled a toothless grin at me. I cringed as I hugged him goodbye. I remember how quickly I ran to pull on my shoes —how desperate I was to get back to our tan minivan. I was so relieved to be rid of him and my grandmother. The week-long trip was just a thing to check off the list of things to do to make my parents happy. Memorize multiplication tables. Check. Read. Check. Visit grandparents and pretend like you're having fun. Check. I recall how happy I was to go back to my life. As soon as we hit the highway the uneasiness of being around him faded away into a distant memory.

Most people remember the first death they experience as being traumatic or heart wrenching. For me it was a relief. It only struck me a few months later, at the age of nine, when my uncle died how horrible I was to think of my grandfather that way.

My Uncle was everything my grandfather was not. My uncle was young and beautiful when God took him away from us. His mind was sharp and his body was strong. I remember how he would pick me up and throw me over his shoulder. How he would show me his coin collection and let me run my small hands over the pile of silver half dollars that he had. If my grandfather was a witch, then my uncle was a brave knight. When the cancer took my uncle away only a few months after it had taken my grandfather I understood that I had been completely wrong in my judgment of my grandfather. All he had done was love me and I couldn't see that. My vision was blurred by my own juvenility and all I could see was myself and my own wants. I was selfish and I began to hate myself for it. How could I have been so self-centered? Why didn't I care? Why couldn't I care? A life had been lost and all I could do was think of myself. I grew up though. I began to think for people who loved me as opportunities not options. At the age of eight I was a child. At the age of nine I became the person I always thought I was. Kind, loving, understanding. I put away my childish thoughts and desires. I learned to look beneath the skin and see love. A Death Lesson taught me this.