Everything is Grace
My grandmother died on a December night as I drove from New Jersey to Alabama. I left a snowy New Jersey as soon as mom called to tell me Granny (as we called her) would likely die – it was already dark. I stopped overnight in Virginia and awoke to another call from my mother saying Granny had died. My heart broke.
Granny and Granny’s home structured my childhood and provided safe haven when my world went sideways. I watched our home burn from her dining room windows at 5 years old. I sat on her kitchen counter and talked about life during my chicken pox infection and recovery. I pulled every baby tooth I had in the first bathroom they added to their house during my mother’s childhood. I spent summers in the “new addition,” built by my aunt and uncle, which she moved to after my grandfather’s death. In the den, she rocked in her chair while my sister and I helped her shell peas and snap green beans – all while watching “stories,” my favorite being “As the World Turns.”
Not seeing her, not holding her hand, not telling her I loved her haunted me. I begged God for some nighttime visitation – to awaken and find her half ghost/half spirit at the end of the bed. I needed to have some closure, to talk with her one more time, to be in her presence again.
Months passed. I finished my Master’s thesis, graduated with my ThM and traveled to California where I began a yearlong college ministry internship at a church in Berkeley. My home for the year consisted of a one room studio-type outbuilding behind a church member’s house. My parents drove with me to California to help me, and the considerable amount of stuff I brought with me, move into my home-for-the-year on Prince Street.
The first night in this new place, Granny appeared to me. Suddenly, her living room den materialized: the cream carpet, the large lamp to the right of her rocking chair spotlighting her, then Granny, elbows resting on the rocking chair’s armrests, the lap blanket draped at the headrest, and I sitting on my knees before her.
The darkness surrounding us, just beyond the lamp’s light, felt full of eyes and bodies (?) huddled over us and around us. I cannot quite say what inhabited that space, but my sense told me people – maybe beings describe them more accurately – but the space was expectant.
Granny and I did not talk long. She asked me again, as she had the last time we saw each other in person, why did I keep leaving home. Though feeling shame, I explained what brought me to California, the church work in which I came to participate. Then she told me she wanted to pray for me, and so I held her hands and she prayed.
The only part of that prayer that I remember her saying is, “Grace, grace – everything is grace.” She finished the prayer, and I realized that she was dead; that this was not Birmingham; this was not her home, but a representation of it; and I immediately threw my arms around her neck and squeezed her tightly and told her I loved her – tears streaming down my face.
Then I awoke in tears – a new day dawning.
(3/25/23)
