Donuts in Heaven

Grief is not confined to a date, or an anniversary marked on the calendar pages, and yet I am safer handling the details & confronting the stories after September. Funny how that works out. The birdman confronted me with a story: Your father, he shook his head…Your father was clinically dead at the wharf. Did you know that? I knew that. I’d heard it before from somewhere. Still, hearing it said outloud n o w, standing before me, made the words sound so much more serious. They echoed in my head. Clinically clinically dead dead dead. Birdman continued. They revived him. He waited for your family to get there. He waited. Waited. I pondered that statement, that detail. Waited. Wait! I was the last to get there. Does that mean he waited for me? Does that imply he held onto life for me? No. I don’t think so. I don’t think he held onto life for anyone but himself. He kept death at bay for himself and his life.

Mom relived The Day from her point of view – even though I didn’t ask her to. “I was making donuts for Mary. Your father said SaveMeOne. He’d have it when he got back. He worried about not having a cage on the boat. It was still dark. He was concerned about not being able to see the buoys. He mentioned it more than once, no cage. I listened on the radio because I never went back to bed.” She never went back to bed. I handled details and let the words wash over me. I washed them down with wine. While the sentences the words formed were not new to me I wasn’t used to hearing them from someone else’s mouth. We never talk about this. Clinically dead. She never went back to bed.

Later we looked at pictures. My grandmother, done up in ribbons and smiles, before life got hard. Too hard. Before she died. Did she wait for someone? Did she hang onto life and kept death at bay for the sake of someone else? I don’t think so. Much like my father, I think her life meant something to her and her alone. Her smile tells me so. I hope they get donuts in heaven.