When Close to Death, Life Changes
My grandmother’s face appeared gaunt like a skeleton. She lay unconscious in the bed set up for her in her living room at home, where she took her final breaths.
At just 59 years old, Garnet was dying of pancreatic cancer. I was 15 years old; when most people are daydreaming of their first kiss, trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up, and learning who at school is their real best friend, I was navigating the rocky terrain of watching my mother, her siblings, their father and other family members grieve the impending loss of someone they loved beyond words.
Garnet was beloved across the community she lived in, too. She was a school board member at a small school district in Central Minnesota, and she was known for supporting the arts and cultural diversity. You could say she was part of a power couple, too; her husband was a vice president at a large retail business called Fingerhut. In her free time, she taught herself to invest by reading the Wall Street Journal each day, she tended a vegetable garden and many plants near a large weeping willow tree, she started side hustles before side hustling was really a thing (she sold environmentally-friendly laundry discs), and she wrote vegetarian recipes for her family members to try. She was also a voracious reader and always found time to put her nose in a book. She was a trailblazer in her family, having been born to farmers who survived the Great Depression. Her mom was also different in her family, having divorced when it was not popular, having also taught herself to invest little bits at a time even as a single mom and as someone with stubborn poverty mindset troubles, and having gotten politically involved by writing and calling her legislators about pressing issues. In that sense, Garnet was different, yet she took after her mom in many ways, too.
But sometimes, life catches us by surprise. Sometimes, life has other plans for us. Sometimes, life has a (weird, frustrating, mysterious) way of taking other trajectories. For Garnet, a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer made no sense. Her illness, and quick downfall after her diagnosis, set off a bomb within the family.
Life certainly was confusing for me as a teenager when my grandmother died. Her presence had been a constant force of comfort and support. She had me and my brother over for sleepovers, meals, swimming days and dance parties. She was my writing mentor. She wanted better for us than what we had at home, where a variety of issues touched our household — depression, anxiety, illness, relationship challenges, and more. When she died, my world crumbled — right when it was supposed to be coming together. Right when life was supposed to be gelling and making sense, it fell apart.
After she took her last breath, I saw my grandpa cry for the first time. The first time I ever saw any grown man cry. Nothing made sense, yet the love in the air was palpable. I didn’t understand what happened, yet later I would learn many lessons about these events that unfolded.
Experts say grief is love adjacent. How much you grieve, is how much you also loved.
What I didn’t understand until years later is how much love and how many tears we hold in the body. How our admiration and anger is held and unfurls through the muscles, the joints, the bones. What we are capable of in love rivals our capacity for pain. As I began a yoga and meditation practice in my late 20s, I began to unravel some of the pain I had to stuff as I survived my own household, school, and a grief-phobic society. My yoga practice started as a way to reduce stress, and evolved to become a way to release long-held grief that had not been expressed much, if at all. It was not a cure-all, but it helped.
I also needed to simply tap into the wisdom I had already carried with me. Growing up around grief and death made me acutely aware of life. How to live it, how to make the most of it, how to find meaning in it, how to give back to it.
I carried so many questions with me about how to create health and happiness, since I had watched so many adults delay their dreams. I watched as illness, fear and misery took hold in some people; I wondered why it might be that so-and-so dreamed of owning their own business or making art but decided not to take the leap. I wondered how come so-and-so wanted the younger generations to carry out what they never dared to themselves. I wondered how criticism rolled off the tongue so easily for certain people and saying “I love you” seemed so impossible for some.
I wanted so badly to avoid these ancestral hauntings — and to help start new dreams in the family line. To halt these cycles and bring more love and more fearlessness and more mindfulness into the generations. Some wisdom traditions say when you heal, you impact seven generations backward and forward. I wanted so much more for the ancestors and future generations than they could ever know for themselves.
I still don’t know for sure why some people leave the earth early, like my grandparents did. (My grandpa died just six years after Garnet passed; he died of a heart condition.) But I do know, when they depart, they leave behind both love and wisdom — the affection we had for them and the lessons they both carried and left behind. If we are lucky, the pain unfolds and alchemizes into something new. It’s not to say death is in any way a good thing, though. But it is to say, we humans are meaning-making, meaning-finding creatures. To move forward from any death, we must find meaning in the loss, says grief expert and therapist David Kessler.
I’m now 40. By now I hope younger me, and my family, are proud of how I’ve lived my life so far. We’ve all been through a lot together so far.
I have many plans that I’m even more excited about. Beyond any worldly accomplishments, though, I have learned what a happy, healthy life actually is — and it has little to do with awards, achievement or recognition. It’s wonderful, and important to honor it. But yet true happiness actually does come from within, as cheesy as it can sound at times.
And at the end of anyone’s life, true ambition looks like a life drenched in love. Though it means people have to feel deeply — yes, even the pain — it also means they will have made the ancestors smile (and hopefully heal backward and forward).