If I Make My Bed in the Grave

When my grandfather died, it hit everybody in my family pretty hard, but the hardest part was watching what it did to my grandmother. She was losing her memory, and she kept forgetting that she’d lost him, or how she’d lost him. She’d wake up looking around for him, and they had to keep telling her he was “with Jesus”. It was miserable.

When she died a month ago, I’d known it was coming for awhile. We all had. So when my family made the long drive out to Arkansas for the funeral, I was sad and empty, but not shocked or disoriented. I just knew it would be hard. 

We all looked great—she’d cared about that. We all behaved well. The funeral home had done a good job with her, and she looked beautiful. The pictures on the slideshow were perfect…her as a little kid with curls, as a gorgeous teenager, as a glamorous bride and young wife, as a mom with high hair and great blazers, as the grandmother I remembered, as the great grandmother she had begun to be. Pictures of her with her husband, her parents, her babies. Her whole long life.

I was her first grandchild. She spoiled me rotten. She thought I was the prettiest, smartest, best at everything. And when I was acting like a brat, she could get through to me. 

Four-year-old me said, “I hate you!” to her when she was patiently brushing my long, tangled hair one day. 

“Well, maybe I hate you too, right now,” she pronounced. 

The silence, the shock. “Mamagin, how could you say that?!”

“Well, Lindsay…did that make you feel bad?” 

Empathy dawned in me, maybe for the first time.

Seven-year-old me was angry and frustrated after getting another “Needs Improvement” on my handwriting. My mom was even more so.

Mamagin sat next to me at my little heart-shaped table and said that I had written a great story, but she couldn’t read it, nobody could. She showed me how to slowly form the letters so they looked nice. I wrote line after line, delightedly telling her to close her eyes so I could write another sentence. She was so happy with my little half-page.

And I loved her. Everybody loved her.

Now I know that none of this was magical. She had been the oldest child of two hardworking entrepreneurial types, she had been a second-grade teacher, she was a mother of 5.

 She was also a survivor of some insane tragedy, and if you know me in real life, you know. I’m not going to talk about it, because my cousin did such a great job talking about it at the funeral. But yeah. She survived some insane violence, the kind of thing that messes you up. And she still believed in God.

Andrew cried at the funeral. I didn’t. I spoke, but didn’t cry. Even when my cousins spoke, and my mom’s cousin spoke, and everyone around me was crying, I couldn’t cry. All I could think was, “I’m not ready.” 

When I was five, she called me on my birthday and said, “Lindsay, I’m not ready for you to be five.”

“Well, Mamagin, if God wants me to be five, I guess…”

The pat answer of a stupid kid? Or did I have a point?

The day she died, I went to HEB for ice cream. Any ice cream. All the ice cream. And some frozen dumplings. I’ve gained six pounds since she died.

There was a flavor called “Grandma’s oatmeal crumble” or something. The pint had a picture of cross stitch and a lady with a gray bun.

I laughed in a dark comedy way. That was somebody’s grandma, not mine.

Mine was cinnamon gum and the alcohol smell of hairspray, those combs that ‘tease’. Stories about pageants, bits of celebrity gossip. Descriptions of parties and fights, the narrative of family, all told in her study or on her bed, or on the back porch while the birds called. Comments, epithets delivered in a voice of conviction. And bright wallpaper and gold-embroidered bedspreads, monogrammed hand towels. She was a closet full of suits and purses, she was the dressing room at Dillards. 

She and I wore the same wedding dress. I am still dressing up for her. I put on bright lipstick and tease my fluffy hair when I want to feel like her, like I could be like her.

She did everything they tell you to do. As a woman, as a mom. She worked, she had babies, she was smart, she was pretty, her husband was crazy about her, her kids and grandkids all adored her. 

Andrew remembers her saying to him, “hello, my sweet baby.” 

I’m not sure she even knew his name anymore when she said that. Maybe she looked in his blue eyes and saw me, or her daughter, or her dad. Maybe she saw how nervous he gets and saw herself. 

She wasn’t perfect, ok? She projected calm elegance, but I know now that was an act. (The calm, not the elegance.) She was the one who convinced me to get on Lexapro. She knew all about fear. She knew all about not feeling good enough. How could she have not felt good enough?

All this swirled in my brain as they shut the lid of the casket, and I didn’t see her anymore. She really had looked great. She was consigned to past tense. They played a song from the nineties about heaven. I had liked it when I was Drew’s age. 

“Not yet, I’m not ready,” I whispered, as my son’s lip quivered and he crossed himself. 

“Light perpetual shine on Mamagin,” he said bravely.

My father said one last prayer at the graveside, as I looked around at all the names on the stones. I recognized some of them. I’d been here before, she’d taken me to see her parents’ graves. It’s a lovely spot. And, as Dad reminded us, this was the land where she’d played as a girl.

All my family is here, I thought, below the ground. I wish I felt the strength of them. I began to realize that they all knew something I was only beginning to know. 

We put roses on her casket and I looked down. I shouldn’t have. There was the pit. The yawning mouth of earth. “For dust you are.” And I couldn’t take it. 

I covered my eyes and fled as fast as my high heels would take me. I collapsed into my sister’s arms and felt the fear and grief and despair falling on me like a landslide. On the bright sunny summer day, I was suddenly in darkness. I’d closed my eyes and was sobbing against Ginni’s black dress. 

She answered me like a grownup. She told me Mamagin was with her husband. I knew that was right, but what did it matter?

 In the face of Death, in the grave’s open maw, who cared? How could you believe in Heaven, in reuniting with your love, when this was all we could see? 

Suddenly so many of them were passing me around, my family on this side of death. I was passed to my dad, who said something dads say to little girls…I don’t remember. Then my husband was holding me, and I was still sobbing with my eyes closed. I couldn’t leave her here with all this uncertainty, with the silence and the darkness. I wasn’t ready. And she couldn’t help me. Nobody could. You can’t go backwards. You can’t un-die. “We can’t leave her here,” I sobbed to my husband. 

Suddenly I was joining the rest of the humans. The ones who knew. Who had seen the pit, who had said it was too soon. I got it now. Boy, did I get it. I got why you’d wail aloud at a funeral, why you’d pay mourners. Because this was the one thing we couldn’t do anything about. So let’s commiserate, let’s suffer as loud as we have to.

“Pretend you’re my minister and tell me what to do,” I ordered my husband  Deacon Thom, the lone Anglican clergyman in a sea of Baptists.

“Well,” he said, his arms around me, “that’s where Jesus went down to bring us all back.”

“He descended to the dead…”

“…if I make my bed in Sheol….”

“… the resurrection and the life.”

I nodded and let myself process that one. 

We stood on the hill looking down at the friends and relatives all chatting, all dressed up and done with tears for now. All glad to see each other even under these circumstances. Well-behaved. She taught us to be well-behaved. “That’s helpful, actually,” I sniffed. And I was done crying by the time people came up to shake our hands. 

Mamagin ran a funeral home. She had visited her parents’ headstones for decades. She’d seen the graves, she’d seen the casket close. She’d seen lots of death and she still believed in God. She knew this. She’d done this.

I’m so scared to die, you guys. But less so now. 

When I was seven I was baptized. My grandparents came. Mamagin gasped a little when the preacher dunked me underwater. On the way out of the church, my hair drying in the cold air and my cute dress scratching my legs, my grandfather carried me to the car, everyone else in his train. We were all going out to celebrate. 

I want to end with that image. A line of noisy family, happy and relieved, on the other side of going under. I hope that’s what it felt like when she died, like she was being carried off to celebrate, in the arms of whoever was sent to come and get her. I saw pictures of her as a seven- year- old. I know, as old as she was, she was her grandparents’ seven-year-old. I’m hoping that’s what dying will be like.

 I’m crying again but it’s not the same kind of crying.

May light perpetual shine on Lily Virginia Smith Stevens. Dear daughter, sister, wife, mom, grandmother, great-grandmother. Mamagin.