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My first car was a 1997 Mercury Mystique. I received it from a retired social worker named Irene Mary Warner, a woman past her driving years, known to her former colleagues as “the Bulldog.” I knew her simply as “Granny.”
Granny raised 10 kids in the small town of Westford Vermont with her husband Walter Warner Senior, himself a contractor by day and a painter by night.
I need to talk about these two because they’re the reason I have any faith at all. They are the entire reason I know the things of God to be something more than bullshit myths. In many ways, they are the entire reason for this book.
I.)
Westford, Vermont is to my family what Jerusalem is to Jews, or Mecca to Muslims. Like other New England towns, Westford’s buildings are gathered around a town common, a large swath of lawn that used to be a field of overgrown grass. And tucked between the houses, my family’s stories have permanent place, as important to the landscape as the Brown’s River at the edge of town, or the covered bridge that, to this day, stretches over it.
I could tell you about the time my Aunt Noreen strung toilet paper across that covered bridge, causing a car and the boat it was pulling to jack-knife. I could tell you that my Uncle Walt (Walter Junior, the second of three Walters in the family) took the blame for it, and how the truth only came out when Granny was on her deathbed. I could tell you that Walter Warner Senior eventually spearheaded the preservation of that bridge when the roads into town were widened. All of these things are part of the story of Westford, as apparent to me as I drive into the town as Vermont’s Autumn colors.
It is more important to the story, though, that you know about the family. Granny and Gramps had 10 children: 7 biological, 3 adopted. My father, Steve, was the oldest of the biological children, a group that included my uncles Tim, Brian, David and Walt. My Aunts are Noreen and Karen. After this my grandparents adopted 3 more: my Aunt Kim, from Korea, my Aunt, Nanakoo, saved off the streets of Calcutta by Mother Teresa, and my Uncle Tom, who became permanently estranged from the entire family long before I was born.
My grandparents would always fill two carts when grocery shopping, and would purchase entire cows at the butcher, only clarifying how said cow was to be carved up. Despite the many mouths to feed, my grandparents always kept space at the table for the many friends my father’s generation brought home. So I grew up knowing many members of that Westford town as a part of the family.
Particular mention should be made, here, of the Larsons. It was Patty Larson that helped my Aunt Noreen with the stringing of toilet paper. When my grandmother lay dying, Juli Larson travelled to be with us. To me, she’s always been “Ms Juli” as opposed to Aunt Juli. But Mrs. Larson died young, and Ms. Juli found mother figures where she could. So when she entered my grandmother’s hospital room, she took her hand and said “Hi Mom” and Granny recognized her voice, opened her eyes and addressed her by name. Grandkids in the Larson clan recognize my grandmother (calling her “Grandma Warner”) in old family pictures. The closer one is to Westford Vermont, the more negligible the differences between Warners and Larsons.
The family’s church was St. Luke’s, a white wooden building in the neighboring town of Fairfax that was subsequently converted to a convenience store. After granny died, I stopped in for history’s sake while driving granny’s ashes back to Westford. I had a naughty chuckle or two imagining my family worshipping there, saying things like “Our pew was back by the freezer section.”
II.
To talk about Granny’s death too soon would be to get ahead of the story. I need to talk first about Gramps’ death. He died suddenly in 1991, when I was 12. He’d had a massive stroke in the lobby of the doctor’s office. The news shook my family. The Patriarch, who came to the table shirtless and ate his steaks rare, who managed the construction of headquarters for a generation of Westford businesses, and who painted from his heart, would never roof another house. In life, he’d smoked swisher sweet cigars and he drank just a little too much.
II.
To talk about Granny’s death too soon would be to get ahead of the story. I need to talk first about Gramps’ death. He died suddenly in 1991, when I was 12. He’d had a massive stroke in the lobby of the doctor’s office. The news shook my family. The Patriarch, who came to the table shirtless and ate his steaks rare, who managed the construction of headquarters for a generation of Westford businesses, and who painted from his heart, would never roof another house. In life, he’d smoked swisher sweet cigars and he drank just a little too much.
Gramps was nothing if not honest. In the course of a single Scrabble game, he would cheat (passing his tiles off as blanks by placing them upside-down,) then be unable to bear it and turn himself in. But for years, and more with notes of sadness than anger, all I could remember was that he’d promised to take me fishing, and died before he kept the promise. I am not sure I would even enjoy fishing…but I would go, were it with him. The suddenness of the death struck Granny hardest. She always said, when she saw him again, that she’d scold him for leaving so abruptly.
Among his possessions, at the end, was a poem my father had written when he was seventeen. Gramps had it in his wallet on the day he died. Granny, knowing my tendencies to wordsmithing, sent it to me. To this day, it’s one of my prized possessions.
My Gramps, to me, isn’t just among those I count as “beloved dead.” He is the reason I believe in heaven. And I believe this because Gramps came from beyond the grave, saved the life of one of his kids, and reached out to another who needed him.
My Uncle David used to work in airplane maintenance. The particular plane he worked on was the F16, a plane about which I know next to nothing. And most of the details don’t matter, except to say that F16’s carry bombs.
On the day when a bomb dropped from the F16 Uncle David was working on, my grandfather was the only reason he was far enough away from the plane to survive.
Imagine a clock face. On that day, the plane was at my Uncle David’s 12. His tool box was at about 4 o’clock. As the story was told to me, right before the bomb dropped, my uncle was getting a tool, and saw my grandfather standing at his 6. Only when Uncle David had turned completely around and taken several large steps away from the plane did the bomb drop and explode. The experts who studied the accident said his distance from the plane was key to his survival. And his father had drawn him away from the plane.
I have asked Uncle David about this incident too many times. Once at a family reunion I cornered him with my most burning question.
“Uncle David” I asked “What do you mean when you say you ‘saw gramps?’”
He replied “I saw him like I see you.”
For the sake of the story, I’ll make bold and call this the “Family Miracle.” I suppose I could disregard it as an isolated incident, if similar unlikely events hadn’t happened to other family members.
For several years, due to problems of addiction, my Aunt Nanakoo was estranged from the family. This was the case in 1991 when gramps died, and so there was no way to find Aunt Nanakoo to tell her that her father had died. After a while, Aunt Nanakoo beat her addictions cold turkey, and my grandmother independently felt the urge to find her daughter. Ever the social worker, my granny used all the skills she had, and found Nanakoo living in Florida, clean and in a stable relationship. Granny made plans to visit.
When the day of their meeting came, Granny opened with the news that Gramps had died. To Granny’s surprise, Nanakoo already knew. And she hadn’t learned it from a newspaper. She’d fallen asleep in the car one day while Larry, just shy, at the time, of being her husband, was in the supermarket. Gramps had appeared to Aunt Nanakoo in a dream. He’d made it clear that he’d died, that he was with her and that he loved her. She treated those things, upon waking, like the facts they were.
In one sense, these stories amount to little more than family lore. But when I first heard them, they became the foundation for important reasoning. If Gramps appeared from beyond the grave, I thought, he must have come from somewhere. And if Gramps was the only reason Uncle David was alive, he must be able to answer my prayers as well. So I no longer doubted not only the existence of heaven, and thenceforth believed in the Saints’ intercession. Because, after all, my grandfather was no saint, and without his appearance two members of my family would have followed drastically different paths. A bona fide Saint, I figured, could do at least as much.
And lets face it, sometimes God is hard to talk to. He’s too big and invisible to avoid this particular pitfall of omnipotence. Shortly after that, whenever I couldn’t talk to God, I started talking to Gramps. I never needed him to appear in my life. I just needed him to listen. It’s a post that he and Granny would come to share.
III.
For a brief stint before entering Mepkin, I had worked as a youth minister in Greensboro, North Carolina. This staging point was most of the reason why I ended up at joining Mepkin. The first monastery a Google search turned up was Mepkin, and for a time, in my life, I saw that as divine providence. So proximity to North Carolina isn’t just why I joined Mepkin, it the reason that, when I would travel from my home in Indiana to the monastery, I would stop off in Greensboro and stay with friends.
I’ve said before that my stays in the monastery grew progressively longer: first a week, as a retreatant, then a month, as a monastic guest, and then three, having made my interest in joining the community known. All of these happened before entering the monastery outright, for what I expected would be forever.
After my month long stint at the monastery, I had just arrived in Greensboro, en-route homeward to South Bend, when I got a phone call from my father. Come to Atlanta, he said: end stage COPD was claiming my grandmother’s life.
Granny moved to Georgia to be close to my Aunts Kim and Karen. Atlanta is a mere six hour drive from Greensboro; while I resided in North Carolina I made it a point to visit her regularly.
Our times together were story times. Granny was not suffering from any form of dementia, but her stories recurred from one visit to the next; I suppose she just knew which stories to entrust to which people, and kept doing it till they stuck.
Granny always referred to Gramps as her “fella.” From the day they married, hard though the commitment was, at times, she never backed down from her love for him. I reckon he should have felt fairly special. You see, Granny’d had a proposal of marriage before meeting Gramps.
He’s known to our family simply as “the tennis player.” Till the day she died, my Granny always remembered two things about the tennis player, without fail: that he was tremendously handsome, and that he used to annoy my grandmother to no end by closing their dates with a singing of “Goodnight Irene.” Granny hated that song. It’s appropriate that, the tennis player’s sport of choice, scorelessness is referred to as “Love:” belting out the ditty that contained her name earned the poor man zero points. I don’t remember a time the song was mentioned in her presence when Granny didn’t visibly cringe.
Ultimately the tennis player became presumptuous, asking my grandmother to type his term papers while he went out drinking. Things like this became a pattern and a warning sign to Granny, and she broke off their engagement.
All of this was water under the bridge, of course, when she met Gramps. He cared for his family immensely. Granny was not surprised to hear that he’d appeared from beyond the grave to Aunt Nanakoo and Uncle David. She had only one enduring objection. She used to smile at us and say “If your Grampy’s making house calls, I wish he’d remember he was married.”
Granny was no stranger to religion. At one point, she had considered converting to Judaism. She always wanted to get at things by their roots, and religion was no different. In the end, she found belief in Jesus to be something she couldn’t abandon. She didn’t shirk religion’s demands, either: it was no small task that she’d guided 10 kids through catechism, even at one point switched churches, citing the priest’s failure to involve lay people in running the parish.
So Granny was unsurprised when I told her about my desire to enter the monastery. She had a way of summing up her feelings in pithy euphemisms, a tendency of which her reaction to me was fine example. She simply said “Well, you’ve picked a hard row to hoe, but you’ve gotta follow your heart. Otherwise, when you look back on your life, all you see is what Paddy shot at and missed.”
On that final trip to Atlanta, I arrived just as Granny was moving from her permanent apartment to her hospice room. What struck me most was her pill case. Granny took a massive number of pills daily, and when she left it behind it was a clear symbol of her willingness to die when it was her time to do so. As they wheeled her out of the room, she saw me eye the pill case. Apparently I looked concerned, because she put her left hand on my arm. With her right she removed the nebulizer mask she was wearing (this was the last time she’d use it.) She looked at the pills, then at me. She smiled and winked, “How ‘bout that? Don’t you worry about me. I’ll be good tomorrow. Today’s high risk.”
When she was fully transitioned to her hospice room, I did notice she’d taken a rosary with her. Over the next four days or so, since I’d just come from a monastery, the family would ask me to lead a rosary several times. I would lay my head against her arm as Granny and I wove through the alternating Our Fathers and Hail Marys. Granny would sometimes reach over with her free hand and stroke my head. She knew, I think, that leading a rosary for the whole family was a heavy responsibility. Not everyone in the family was still Catholic. Some of them had left the church altogether, some had converted to more conservative Christian religions. This phenomenon was Granny’s reason for the name she gave her family. She called us “her motely crew.”
When someone I love is in hospice care, everything stops; their care becomes something for which I drop everything. This would come to serve me well in the monastery, and I would help seven monks through their last days.
In Granny’s case it was a reason to be totally present to her. Over the next four days, each family member had a moment being close to Granny. There were nightlong vigils that consisted of simply listening to granny breathe. Something occurred to me that never had before, and it would come back to me over the many years at Mepkin, working in palliative care. Granny was choosing to take each breath. And during the moments when she’d fall out of lucidity, we all knew she was in intense negotiations with her maker.
It’s said that a person who’s still breathing but not lucid can still hear what’s going on around them. Granny was totally aware of which children were driving to see her. Uncle David and his wife Jeanette were the last to arrive. I am convinced Granny knew they were coming.
She died about an hour later. It happened like this: Aunt Kim leaned in to whisper in her ear. She said “After your funeral, we’re gonna go back to the house in Westford, thank the people who’ve watched it for us since we moved out, but tell them their services are no longer required, and that they can move out now.”
Granny hadn’t been lucid for hours. But when Aunt Kim said what she said, the corners of Granny’s mouth bent up in a smile, then she exhaled a last puffed breath, and died.
Many of us cried when granny passed, but after 4 days of grieving, my entire family was exhausted. We needed what most people need after a catharsis: beer. In relative, tired silence we filed back into cars and ended up crammed, all of us, into my aunt Karen’s kitchen. By and by everyone had a full glass, and we all stood waiting for someone to know what to say.
In a moment of inspiration, I raised my glass into the cloud of silence that hung over the room. I looked around at my family and said “Goodnight, Irene.”
Everyone knew the story. Everyone laughed. I think even the tennis player, wherever he was spending his eternity, got a chuckle out of it.
III.
For a brief stint before entering Mepkin, I had worked as a youth minister in Greensboro, North Carolina. This staging point was most of the reason why I ended up at joining Mepkin. The first monastery a Google search turned up was Mepkin, and for a time, in my life, I saw that as divine providence. So proximity to North Carolina isn’t just why I joined Mepkin, it the reason that, when I would travel from my home in Indiana to the monastery, I would stop off in Greensboro and stay with friends.
I’ve said before that my stays in the monastery grew progressively longer: first a week, as a retreatant, then a month, as a monastic guest, and then three, having made my interest in joining the community known. All of these happened before entering the monastery outright, for what I expected would be forever.
After my month long stint at the monastery, I had just arrived in Greensboro, en-route homeward to South Bend, when I got a phone call from my father. Come to Atlanta, he said: end stage COPD was claiming my grandmother’s life.
Granny moved to Georgia to be close to my Aunts Kim and Karen. Atlanta is a mere six hour drive from Greensboro; while I resided in North Carolina I made it a point to visit her regularly.
Our times together were story times. Granny was not suffering from any form of dementia, but her stories recurred from one visit to the next; I suppose she just knew which stories to entrust to which people, and kept doing it till they stuck.
Granny always referred to Gramps as her “fella.” From the day they married, hard though the commitment was, at times, she never backed down from her love for him. I reckon he should have felt fairly special. You see, Granny’d had a proposal of marriage before meeting Gramps.
He’s known to our family simply as “the tennis player.” Till the day she died, my Granny always remembered two things about the tennis player, without fail: that he was tremendously handsome, and that he used to annoy my grandmother to no end by closing their dates with a singing of “Goodnight Irene.” Granny hated that song. It’s appropriate that, the tennis player’s sport of choice, scorelessness is referred to as “Love:” belting out the ditty that contained her name earned the poor man zero points. I don’t remember a time the song was mentioned in her presence when Granny didn’t visibly cringe.
Ultimately the tennis player became presumptuous, asking my grandmother to type his term papers while he went out drinking. Things like this became a pattern and a warning sign to Granny, and she broke off their engagement.
All of this was water under the bridge, of course, when she met Gramps. He cared for his family immensely. Granny was not surprised to hear that he’d appeared from beyond the grave to Aunt Nanakoo and Uncle David. She had only one enduring objection. She used to smile at us and say “If your Grampy’s making house calls, I wish he’d remember he was married.”
Granny was no stranger to religion. At one point, she had considered converting to Judaism. She always wanted to get at things by their roots, and religion was no different. In the end, she found belief in Jesus to be something she couldn’t abandon. She didn’t shirk religion’s demands, either: it was no small task that she’d guided 10 kids through catechism, even at one point switched churches, citing the priest’s failure to involve lay people in running the parish.
So Granny was unsurprised when I told her about my desire to enter the monastery. She had a way of summing up her feelings in pithy euphemisms, a tendency of which her reaction to me was fine example. She simply said “Well, you’ve picked a hard row to hoe, but you’ve gotta follow your heart. Otherwise, when you look back on your life, all you see is what Paddy shot at and missed.”
On that final trip to Atlanta, I arrived just as Granny was moving from her permanent apartment to her hospice room. What struck me most was her pill case. Granny took a massive number of pills daily, and when she left it behind it was a clear symbol of her willingness to die when it was her time to do so. As they wheeled her out of the room, she saw me eye the pill case. Apparently I looked concerned, because she put her left hand on my arm. With her right she removed the nebulizer mask she was wearing (this was the last time she’d use it.) She looked at the pills, then at me. She smiled and winked, “How ‘bout that? Don’t you worry about me. I’ll be good tomorrow. Today’s high risk.”
When she was fully transitioned to her hospice room, I did notice she’d taken a rosary with her. Over the next four days or so, since I’d just come from a monastery, the family would ask me to lead a rosary several times. I would lay my head against her arm as Granny and I wove through the alternating Our Fathers and Hail Marys. Granny would sometimes reach over with her free hand and stroke my head. She knew, I think, that leading a rosary for the whole family was a heavy responsibility. Not everyone in the family was still Catholic. Some of them had left the church altogether, some had converted to more conservative Christian religions. This phenomenon was Granny’s reason for the name she gave her family. She called us “her motely crew.”
When someone I love is in hospice care, everything stops; their care becomes something for which I drop everything. This would come to serve me well in the monastery, and I would help seven monks through their last days.
In Granny’s case it was a reason to be totally present to her. Over the next four days, each family member had a moment being close to Granny. There were nightlong vigils that consisted of simply listening to granny breathe. Something occurred to me that never had before, and it would come back to me over the many years at Mepkin, working in palliative care. Granny was choosing to take each breath. And during the moments when she’d fall out of lucidity, we all knew she was in intense negotiations with her maker.
It’s said that a person who’s still breathing but not lucid can still hear what’s going on around them. Granny was totally aware of which children were driving to see her. Uncle David and his wife Jeanette were the last to arrive. I am convinced Granny knew they were coming.
She died about an hour later. It happened like this: Aunt Kim leaned in to whisper in her ear. She said “After your funeral, we’re gonna go back to the house in Westford, thank the people who’ve watched it for us since we moved out, but tell them their services are no longer required, and that they can move out now.”
Granny hadn’t been lucid for hours. But when Aunt Kim said what she said, the corners of Granny’s mouth bent up in a smile, then she exhaled a last puffed breath, and died.
Many of us cried when granny passed, but after 4 days of grieving, my entire family was exhausted. We needed what most people need after a catharsis: beer. In relative, tired silence we filed back into cars and ended up crammed, all of us, into my aunt Karen’s kitchen. By and by everyone had a full glass, and we all stood waiting for someone to know what to say.
In a moment of inspiration, I raised my glass into the cloud of silence that hung over the room. I looked around at my family and said “Goodnight, Irene.”
Everyone knew the story. Everyone laughed. I think even the tennis player, wherever he was spending his eternity, got a chuckle out of it.
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