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CHAPTER TWO
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The next few days were filled with seeing distant relatives, goodbyes, and making plans to take care of Memaw’s final arrangements.
She truly had been very specific about what she had wanted.
Her funeral was honorable and uplifting, although the aura was marred by the fact that it still felt like she had so much to give to the world.
One of the only things that helped me find any sort of acceptance was the fact that there was nothing unsaid or unspoken between us; we had always been a support for each other, and I knew that our bond would never be broken, not even by death itself.
She had wanted Rachel and me to have her house and property.
She had hoped that we’d someday be able to get out of the apartment we’d been in since we got married, and if we had a place of our own, we could someday think about having kids.
She was the most modern-thinking person of her generation that I ever knew, never once allowing age to slow her down.
She was so colloquial and so funny, and was mentally cognizant until the very last few days of her life, and for that, I was so thankful.
I always relied on her wit and her guidance with so many things.
Only in retrospect did I remember an undertone of pensiveness in her demeanor, and that at times, her mood could change from jovial to serious, but she always seemed to cover it all with a smile.
On the Tuesday evening after Memaw passed, we met my parents at Memaw’s house to figure out where to start.
Mom was standing in the living room, next to the ornate mantle, softly crying over a picture of her and Memaw, taken when she was about twelve.
My dad had his hands on her shoulders, trying to comfort her.
I knew that we’d all have moments like this for quite a while.
As soon as I touched the doorknob, I was hit head-on with a moment that had occurred just a few months before she suffered the stroke that had taken her from us.
It had been just another Friday, and I stopped in to see her after I was finished at the office. Rachel had been working an evening shift, so I figured it had been a good opportunity to spend some quality time.
I stepped up onto the porch and did our signature knock on the door. From the kitchen, I heard her shout, “That you, Lewie?” (She was the only one who ever called me ‘Lewie’; she thought ‘Moose’ was undignified.)
“I brought you something, Memaw,” I’d said while pushing the door open.
“Ooh, white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies?” she had said, her eyes lighting up.
“Nope, pizza!”
“Even better. Black olives?”
“Only on your half!”
She threw her head back and belly-laughed. We sat down and shared our dinner and great conversation, which always circled around to the ability we both shared.
As I was growing up, she helped me navigate this ability.
She helped me to define it as “a gift with a burden,” as it is a gift to be able to do what I can do, but sometimes a tremendous burden to get so personal with people that I have never known.
And with my job, will never know. She helped me to work out exactly how to use it.
Encouraging me to meditate every night to “dump the baggage of the visions,” and once when I was 14 years old and completely overwhelmed every single day after school, from all the contact she sat me down and said, “You know, when it gets too much, you can turn it off. Not off forever, but you can, with practice, turn it off so that you can control when you use it.” And with those words, I began practicing meditation because it does take a great deal of concentration and meditation just to be able to find a quiet place within your own thoughts to turn this little gift off or even just to turn it down.
It is especially difficult when you’re dealing with the family of a person who wants you to be a conduit into the last moments of life for their loved one.
After so many times, you never get desensitized to it, and it takes a toll on you emotionally.
“You have to be able to save a part of yourself for yourself,” she had said gently. “You have to maintain all of your relationships, and in order to do that, you have to protect YOU,” she said, gently placing her palm on my chest.
Suddenly, Rachel’s hand on my shoulder brought me back to where I’d been. “You okay, babe? You zoned out there for a second,” she said.
“Yeah, I just had a vivid memory when my hand touched the doorknob.”
“A good one, I hope,” she smiled.
“It was,” I smiled back.
Rachel and I have a great relationship. We don’t take ourselves too seriously, and we aren’t afraid to laugh at ourselves when we do something silly.
We make each other laugh, but we are the rock the other leans on.
I can’t imagine my life without her wisdom and compassion on my side, and I try to be the same for her.
We fall short sometimes, as everyone does, but we always come back to center to each other.
Because of the stress and serious nature of the last few days, Rachel and I had instinctively stopped playing our favorite game, giving each other hell about silly things like old relationships.
When she was sixteen, she’d gone through a rebellious time and got the name of her then-boyfriend, Brad, tattooed on her left shoulder blade.
The artwork is terrible, and I love giving her a hard time.
I’ll say things like, “Gee, I wonder what ole Brad is doing these days,” and she’ll playfully push me away, saying, “Gee, I don’t know, maybe he got tied down to a gem of a woman like Stacy,” (who happened to be my high school girlfriend of over two years who had a complete melt down in front of the whole school when I broke up with her for cheating on me).
We greeted my parents with hugs and a few tears, and then we started talking about where to start.
My dad and I went out to their SUV to grab some storage containers.
He stopped before opening the hatch and said, “You know, your memaw really was a fine woman. She welcomed me from the start, which always surprised me, that she didn’t feel like I was taking her little girl away, or at least she never acted like it,” he smiled slightly.
“Especially since your mom was an only child.”
“This is going to be really hard on your mom, you know,” he said with a more serious tone, “especially since Memaw went downhill so fast after the stroke. We all thought she had more time. She’s really been on edge over the past few days; maybe it’s just the added stress of having to deal with all the family coming in.
She hasn’t seen most of them in years, and it really set off her anxiety. ”
“I know, and I’ll be here for it. Rach and I both will.”
“I know,” Dad said, with that reassuring smile.
“Not that I think he’d care,” I pondered, “but does anyone even know how to get in touch with Mom’s father to let him know that Memaw passed?”
“You know, I’ve heard through the years, just from various people around town, that evidently, he was known around town as quite a piece of shit.
A cheater and abuser. To my knowledge, she never looked for him.
As a matter of fact, I brought it up a few times through the years, and she’d nearly bite my head off.
She would shudder and say that he wasn’t worth talking about and that she and her mother were infinitely better off after the son-of-a-bitch left.
When he wasn’t working, he would stay drunk and beat your memaw.
I think he might have abused your mom, too, but she’s never given me any details, and I certainly don’t push it.
All she really said was that she never missed him and that she hoped he’d wound up six states away and reaping every bit of misery he’d ever sown.
And from everything I’ve heard through the years, no one around these parts ever missed him.
But there was speculation that your memaw’s brother, Uncle David, had, how should I put it, taken care of him.
Her father, John Robert, and David had hated each other.
One night, I heard it got really heated and had gone beyond a screaming match and had turned to blows.
Guilia and John Robert had a particularly nasty fight, and she had grabbed your mom, who was only about five at the time, and ran to her parents’ house.
David just happened to be there when John Robert came to get them.
David took John Robert out into the yard and told him that if he ever laid another hand on either Guilia or your mom, he would make sure that they would never find his body.
Apparently, David roughed him up pretty good, and John Robert swore that he would never lay another hand on them, but no one believed he kept that promise.
He was a real bastard, and he disappeared just over a year after that incident. ”
“I just can’t imagine, first off, anyone being that kind of dick to Mom or Memaw, then just to go off with someone else and abandon your family.”
“Some people are just built differently, Moose; I don’t understand it either,” he said softly, reaching into the back hatch for the storage containers.
“No one ever talks about family, so I am not sure who to ask, but what happened to Uncle David? Can we find him? I’m positive he would want to know about Memaw. I think I’ve seen pictures of him scattered about, but I really don’t know anything about him.”
Dad continued, “Well, David ran with a fairly rough crowd. A motorcycle gang, I believe. But he had a big heart and loved Guilia and Claire. He tried to help them as much as he could after John Robert skipped town. Right after your mom and I got married in 1990, he was riding that big Harley of his and took a sharp curve way too fast and hit a tree. The medical examiner said he died instantly, which was most likely a blessing. Guilia and Claire were devastated.”