Negotiating a never-ending nap

I learned about death when Kansas Grandma died. I took one look at her in that casket and I knew she wasn't coming back. I was maybe five or six. I didn't much like it, but in our house, we talked about reincarnation and dog heaven and such things that made death seem a little less catastrophic.

I was the youngest child at the funeral. I was a last child. Last children inherit the family's oldest memories of death because they get those memories sooner in life than anyone else, before their perception of the world is rearranged by religion, fear, grief and mythology. The younger we are when we experience death, the more intimate and truthful our perception of it, but the less capable we are of describing it.

I can still feel that day like it was tattooed on me. It was the day I learned about never.

When someone dies, adults pretend children don't know what's going on. Adults tell children dead people are sleeping, and the children may seem fooled, but "sleeping" provokes a hundred questions, articulated or not, beginning with "When is grandma going to wake up?"

Never.

Grandma was never going to wake up.

I knew that and all the big people around me knew that, but no one had the time or the composure just then to discuss it. Never is a fairly potent concept for anyone giving it any amount of thought at any age. After cogitating never for a minute or two, you're into eternity and then the soul, and if there is one, why doesn't anybody have a picture of it, and where does it go and why can't we go visit?

Ultimately, Jesus was put forth to contemplate never, but no one dared to point out that Jesus was a poor substitute for someone who's kitchen smelled like chocolate-chip cookies and who's spare closet was full of your toys. Jesus was a character in an ongoing Sunday School saga about a very nice man who died before even grandma was born, so how in the world was he supposed to make things better? You couldn't even see him, but all the big people said he was everywhere, and if they were wrong about that, what about the monsters under the bed? What about spanking and bedtime, deep water, and flying saucers? What about when they said they loved you?

When we're little, we accept what adults say because it takes about 30 years to develop an alternate line of reasoning, get mad at our parents for lying and possibly squeeze a novel out of the injustice, eventually face the responsibility of explaining death to a child and replace the combination sleeping metaphor-Jesus alibi with New Age euphemisms. Everything-comes-and goes versus the long-term nap and the see-through people.

I knew the day Kansas Grandma was lowered into the ground I would never see her again. I would never again sit on her linoleum floor or play with my cousins on her front step. She was no more. There would be no more new memories of her. There would only be the few that I had.

She was tired a lot. She lived in a little basement apartment that was always cold. Her last job was working as a fry cook at a roadside diner on the fringe of Pratt, Kan., where we went to see her before she got sick. She made me a bunny-shaped pancake for breakfast while I watched her at the grill. Not long after that, she went to a hospital where little kids couldn't go. She never came out.

Never.

Monday, December 7, 1998

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.