We buried my grandmother last Saturday. She was old – 89 years plus – and her time had definitely passed. Her funeral was less of a mourning of her passing, but more of a celebration of her life. Many people quoted her as saying that she had “found heaven on Earth” with her husband, four children, 12 grandchildren (and their four spouses) and 2 great-grandchildren. It must be wonderful to be in a position to think of your life that way.
Friday night was the showing at the funeral home and then we all went to dinner – among four siblings with 2-4 kids each, and spouses and children and grandchildren, there was a good thirty of us just in our branch of the Robinson clan. But Grandma was the oldest of 10, and the funeral was in Benton Harbor/St Joseph where she grew up, and many other relatives were staying in the same hotel as us. After dinner and an hour or two of swimming, somehow everyone ended up in the large common room next to the lobby and in front of the pool. We all started in my mom and dad’s room, but it got full and we learned that several other family members were downstairs, and that they had beer. So a common room full of cousins, and aunts, and more cousins set to drinking. My mom was drinking cosmopolitans because that was Grandma’s favorite, or possibly martinis – a lot of them were, but if you were drinking actual liquor and your glass was empty you had to head back upstairs; if you were drinking beer and you got to the end of the can, you just had to reach in for another can. That, and the fact that martinis and cosmopolitans taste icky to me, and I’ve placed a stigma after watching my grandparents drink them for 20 years that they are an older American’s drink.
For some reason when all of the cousins are together, and we’re drinking, we sing. A lot. And loud. There wasn’t a one of us there who didn’t believe that Grandma would want us to toast her passing in this way – the phrase “toast to Grandma” was yelled so many times that I think they’re repainting the Holiday Inn sign to have the subphrase “Toast to Grandma” at the bottom. Little brother Teddy asked the front desk more than once if we were too loud and should move upstairs – the desk said no, and that being in the middle of the hotel we wouldn’t bother anyone. My wife was in our room upstairs, and she assured me more than once that the singing and the celebration of the life moved on was not only loud, but too loud, and I think the phrase “too freaking loud for words” was thrown around. And yet, we were not made to leave. And the celebrating continued.
Every son, or daughter, or niece, or nephew, or sister (I don’t remember any of Grandma’s brothers being there) shared a Margaret story – it can’t really be said that we shared the stories in turn, because 20 drunks yelling to be heard don’t really go in turns. And at some point, for whatever reason, I decided that I couldn’t hear anyone yelling, unless they were standing on a chair and yelling. There’s something about standing on a chair that makes being drunk intensified – it’s like you’re actually MORE drunk when you’re standing on a chair. And the yelling on a chair? It might not make sense now, but at the time it made perfect sense that yelling wasn’t good enough, you needed to be yelling on a chair. The evening’s crowd lessened as time passed, and finally between my brother, cousin Nate and I, we decided we could drink the remaining eigh beers before going to bed. Quite honestly, we couldn’t – I’ve grown enough in my alcohol-consuming years not to know when to stop or I’ll become a loud obnoxious ass, but enough so that I know when I need to stop drinking or else become a passed-out, vomiting ass. As luck and a thesaurus would have it, I call that progress. Teddy and Nate did what they could, but the eight beers would not fall. Hundreds of years from now storytellers will sit around campfires and tell the tale of how the three drunk brothers celebrating their grandmother couldn’t finish the eight beers. Hopefully in the story there will be some sort of wolf or dragon involved – but that’s how good stories evolve, and not for me to say.
I was going to make my stories not ramble – apparently that starts next time.
Anyway, we all shared stories of Grandma – my story went a little like this:
It was around 1991 – the Sandman was my favorite comic book (by Neil Gaiman and a host of artists – if you’ve never read it, tell me and I’ll let you borrow my copies, it’s an amazing story by an amazing author), and it had caught on with the general comic book reading public (all 100 of us). The Sandman Special was a big deal with a retelling of the story of Orpheus. Flash-forward a few years and we’re at grandma’s house at Xmas. She always had exotic fruit at x-mastime, I have no idea why. For whatever reason, there’s a pomegranate at the table and everyone started going into how much my little brother likes pomegranates – what? Grandma proceeded to tell us the story of Orpheus and the pomegranate. Except for the part about the pomegranate, it was the same as the comic I had previously read, which was honestly just cool. The next time we saw her I gave grandma a copy of that comic book, telling her that it was about Orpheus and the pomegranate, and it reminded me of her. She was overjoyed in that grandmotherly way, and I told her sheepishly that there might some swear words in it.
“Sometimes,” she said, “that’s the way it has to be to tell a story.” That made me laugh and smile at the same time.
And so it went that I - full of beer burps from the night before, sorrow over the passing of my grandmother, remorse over leaving my wife alone in the hotel room for four hours when I said it would be one hour, and no small amount of satisfaction knowing that Grandma would have been proud of how we celebrated her, was one of six men that carried her body, in a casket, to her final resting place.
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