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My Life and Her Death

By Sarah Stodola

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My grandparents are all long gone by now, and have been for ten years. Each one of them succumbed to a different classic derivative of old age - one a stroke, one a heart attack, one Alzheimer’s, and one cancer. This gave me a wide sampling of what happens to people when they involuntarily trade in their youth for something much less enviable, and much more inevitable. I was just a kid, though, so the diseases and malfunctions didn’t have the impact on me that they might have if I were the age I am now when they brushed up against my life. I was sad when each grandparent passed away, but not in the way that someone who understands life and death better than I did then would. Perhaps some of what was missing was fear, and not sadness. I didn’t understand enough to be fearful at the fragility of life when someone died, because let’s face it, fear is almost always fear for oneself, and at the age of ten, it’s impossible to liken an eighty-year-old’s life and death to your own.

That’s not necessarily to say that I didn’t fear death as a child. When I was eleven or twelve years old, I used to keep myself awake at night with thoughts of what happens to people when they die. I was not brought up with any religion whatsoever, so I didn’t even have that to fall back on. I knew that there were these places called Heaven and Hell that supposedly existed, and that supposedly, according to some of my childhood friends, everyone went to one of those two places when they died. But I could see no reason to accept this as true, even in middle school. I used to wonder if I should be baptized, just in case; as a safety precaution, not because I really believed that baptism would save me. Religious matters didn’t scare me.

What did scare me was the thought that when I died, I would just become nothing. This single thought could occupy me for hours. Mine was obviously the only perspective I’d ever known, and if I got old and died, and that perspective vanished, then that would mean that, from my perspective, there would be nothing for the rest of eternity. Thoughts like this made me understand why people are religious, but they still couldn’t convince me to become religious myself. My eventual conclusion, sometime in high school, was to simply stop thinking about it. It’s been a pretty successful strategy, for the most part. Anyway, I’ve stuck with it ever since.

These late-night musings of death, though, didn’t quite make death seem real to me, and the complete gravity of the passing of each of my grandparents didn’t quite hit home. I guess I just hadn’t really lived enough yet to genuinely mourn. At funerals, instead of mourning, I just felt really awkward. And like so many other things, I didn’t learn to appreciate the profundity of death until well after all of my grandparents had fallen victim to it.

My grandmother on my mother’s side was the first of my grandparents to die. I was less than a year old when it happened. She was the stroke, and people who knew her say that she was young until it happened, which made it a shock. She didn’t seem like she was ready to go. Technically I’ve met her. But it was before I knew how to speak, and of course I don’t remember it. So how can I feel sad when I think of her death?

My mother never told me how similar my grandmother and I were until I was in my early twenties. I remember the moment clearly. Mom was visiting me in New York, and she had taken my best friend and me out to dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant in the East Village. It came up casually in the course of conversation. She mentioned it and then moved on to the next topic. I made her return. I found it impossible to believe that in all my life, my mother had never thought to tell me that I reminded her acutely of her own mother. I’d never thought seriously of the grandmother I’d never known. My other grandmother and I had had nothing in common, aside from a mutual fondness for my father, I suppose. I’d never considered that the other grandmother would have been any different if she’d been alive during my life. After that night in the little restaurant on an obscure block in downtown Manhattan, though, I developed not only an interest, but also a feeling of connection, with the grandmother I never knew.

My own parents are very different from each other, and correspondingly different from me. I’m talking about our personalities and interests in this case, but the difference is reflected physically, as well. My mother has blond hair, and my father has dark brown - almost black - hair. I have light brown hair. Dad has blue eyes. Mom’s are brown. Mine are hazel. We don’t have the same nose, or the same smile, or the same gate. We’ve never been one of those families that people look at and immediately recognize as “a family,” in the Norman Rockwell sense. We also don’t have the same taste in music, the same sense of humor, or the same career interests. I have a great family, and I had a great childhood. But we (my brother included) often seem more like four arbitrary people who were thrown into a house to live together than we do like a bunch with a common genetic history. Growing up, I never really had that feeling that I had stemmed from my family. My family was simply where I ended up living, and the people I ended up knowing.

So to learn that I actually resembled someone I was related to was a pretty big deal. It meant that I came from somewhere. It meant that there was a precedent to me becoming the person I am. And it meant that I was now sad to think of my grandmother’s death.

Bernice Jorgensen was her name. She was born in Wisconsin to a wealthy family who lost their fortune in the stock market crash. She met my grandfather in her early twenties, but they didn’t get married until eight years later. She spent her twenties as a single woman - something no other woman in my family has done, until me. She was the only one of my grandparents to attend college. And not only did she receive a bachelor’s degree, but she went on to graduate study at the University of Chicago. She completed everything necessary to attain a Ph.D. in history except a dissertation. And she lived in Chicago - no one else in my family has ever lived in a major city, either, until me.

Since that night in the East Village, the similarities between my grandmother and me seem to be closer to the front of my mother’s thoughts. For example, I’ve always recorded favorite pages, passages, and quotes from the books I read in a journal in the back of my Filofax (dare I admit that I own a Filofax?). I’d always thought that my mother knew I did this - it’s not the kind of thing I would do clandestinely - since I often read in the same room as her. But recently when she noticed me doing it, she marveled that her mother had done the exact same thing, only presumably not in a Filofax. I don’t imagine that it’s all that uncommon for a person to develop this sort of ritual, especially if that person is passionate about literature. But the truth remains that my grandmother and I are the only members of my family who have ever felt passionate enough about literature to record the parts of it which move us the most. I would love to get my hands on her version of my Filofax journal.

Similarities such as this stand in my mind as proof of my lineage. And they make me feel a bit less arbitrary - a bit more like I was destined to become who I am, and not like I became who I am by accident, or as a result of chance influences.

I still don’t know that much about my grandmother. I don’t have a picture of her in my memory. But in a way, I feel a closer connection with her than with my other three grandparents, all of whom were around for at least a decade of my life, and who I had the opportunity to know. And I think it’s possible that if they were all still around today, she would be the most proud of what I have done with my life so far.

It’s too bad that her life ended while mine was still so young. The realization that my grandmother was someone I would like to have known, and that because of her death I never had the chance to get to know her, does indeed underscore the profundity of death for me. It would have been really nice to call my grandmother and tell her that I wrote an essay about her, and to have her be flushed with joy to know that she had a granddaughter who did things like write essays about her grandmother. Maybe it would have made her feel like something of her would live on long after she was gone. And she, too, would have been happy to see a bit of herself in another generation.

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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2003 Me Three