A week and a half ago my Grandaddy died in the nursing home after a difficult night preceded by a few difficult couple of days. What that means exactly, no one has shared, but my grief has been a bit of a weird one. People come up to me and make a sad face, say how sorry they are, and give me a hug. I accept it graciously and relate to them that he was 94 and it really wasn’t that much of a surprise. He’d led a good life, was well loved by his friends and family, visited often, and so there really wasn’t much to grieve on my end. I wrote a post on my Facebook page about how few memories I have of him, and yet every one of those memories stuck with me over the years becoming the sand around which a pearl was born in my life. The metaphor breaks down when we remember that the sand is an irritant and the pearl is the oyster’s immune system reacting, but I mean it as something super tiny, seemingly benign and insignificant, creating something unique and valuable.
Death and funerals offer us a tremendous gift if we can see it. So often our vision is clouded by our natural grief and overwhelming sense of loss that we can miss it. Fortunately we don’t have to be aware of it in order to benefit from it. One of the greatest consequences of death is that it causes us to talk about life in ways that we hardly ever do. We suddenly have a resounding clarity, a shift in focus that causes us to talk about the deceased loved one’s life. We say things like, “He really knew what was important in life,” and then we enumerate it. We discuss with one another what makes a good life of a bad life, a life well lived or a life wastefully spent. We prioritize this habit over that habit, this value over another and we tell our kids, “Live like him in this way,” in an attempt to secure that behavior in the generation that follows our own. We tell stories about them and relate, “Oh, yeah. He was always like that.” We reflect on who they were and how that directly affected how we are. Death and funerals grant us another chance to dispel the fog of the day-to-day grind from our eyes and see the target more clearly.
It was not different during my Grandaddy’s funeral. We told stories and caught up, oohed and awwed over how big the kids have become, how grey our hair has gotten, and how we are now a generation that we once found it impossible to believe we would become.
Somewhere in the middle of walking up to the casket, and viewing the photos of his life, the introduction to second and third cousins and even more distant relations, some of these things became clear.
I realized soon after his passing that my Grandaddy was a simple man with a simple life and with the benefit of my age I could see just how rich he truly was. He wasn’t college educated, worked what jobs he could to keep his wife and five boys in food and clothing. They didn’t have much. And yet he was far richer than other men that I knew.
One of the riches was that I don’t remember Grandaddy ever rushing anywhere, or rushing in a panic as he did things. What he did, he did deliberately thinking in through and taking his time. Whether it was household chores, tying his shoes, studying the Bible, working in the garden, or building furniture in his workshop, he gave it the time, attention, and care it needed. He didn’t fill his life with unnecessary stressors or distractions.
The other day in my small group we were talking about compassion and how so often we are rushing from thing to thing, event to event, and then on top of that filling our lives with the next big thing, the newest fad, the latest iPhone and then working overtime or going into debt to pay for it, or being outraged by the latest political issue that we have neither the time nor the energy to be able to be compassionate as Jesus calls us to be. As I listened to stories around the funeral it became clear that Grandaddy had plenty of time to be compassionate, made space to watch fireflies with his grandson, always had time to go fishing with his sons, and to sit on the porch with his wife and friends chatting with whomever passed by. Why? Because he kept that potential space free. That space if it was unused was not considered wasted. He was absent of “hustle culture”. Sure he didn’t have a brand new car, nor the latest TV, and had to make do with a tiny kitchen that was also a laundry room…but he knew that the riches were not in the newest stuff or the biggest house. He lived in the same small house that was for all the decades that I knew him. Certainly they made improvements but it was theirs outright and there was visible peace in that.
The life well lived is not on Instagram. It isn’t in globe trotting. It isn’t in the consumption of gathering all we can buy. It isn’t in staying as distracted as we can. It is in digging in the earth causing things to grow, working with our hands to craft something for those we love, embracing the delights and magic of the natural world, holding those near us close in friendship and love, and either singing or dancing when music plays if you can’t do both.
So often we consider the words “Carpe Diem” (seize the day), and “Memento Mori” (remember you are mortal/will die) in order to spur us on to great and amazing deeds and only the heroic or financially prosperous will do. We think that seizing the day looks like trying to achieve as much as possible to beat out others, when it may actually be more fulfilling to rise, love your neighbor, and work with what is in front of you. It’s not meant to be an anthem to perpetually seek after greener pastures with the almighty dollar as the goal. To remember that we will die is less about hustling so you can enjoy earthly pleasures now, but remembering that everything you do echoes in eternity and the most important thing you can do is live rightly for the time you are on earth with those directly in your local sphere.
One of the terrible things in this life, an absolute moral and philosophical scourge, has been the usage of advertising. Advertising uses psychology to seduce the public into sacrificing peace, time with family, ruminating, and even taking time to just enjoy life in order to have bigger, better, newer, faster, louder, more.
The longer I reflect on my Grandaddy’s life, his gift that meant the most to me was his open acceptance and love for me just because I was his grandchild. His second greatest gift to me was the example he gave me of a simple life sitting on the porch swing, content with nothing more than a sweet tea, the sunshine, a nice breeze, and a ball game to look forward to. It has helped me reject Modernity and its chaos and drives even if I didn’t realize it at the time.
Speaking of which, one of my much loved cousins told me at the funeral, “You just have to have a porch swing, even if you don’t have a porch. It’s a part of our…people…our way…our…” “Culture?” I offered and it was agreed. So, I’ll be looking for one of those once payday comes around again.
Thank you for reading. This one feels a little more disjointed than others, but I guess I feel a little more disjointed than usual. As I said, deaths and funerals do things for us. It’s not always on the surface. Sometimes those thoughts are still processing deeply within us and might make little sense when we try to relate them.
As always, if any of this made you think, wonder, or touched you in any other way please consider liking, sharing and subscribing.
Next time we return to the book of Genesis.
Finding Narnia 
Leave a comment