the borders we must cross separately  ~ Naomi Shihab Nye, Making a Fist

When I was 13 and my grandfather was 64, ten years younger than I am now, we both had borders we were crossing separately. I had crossed into my first year as a teen in which I consistently hated everyone and everything, including myself.

My grandfather was slowly and painfully crossing the border into his death by cancer. He did it quietly and with patience like he did everything else. He taught me how to be patient and quiet when he took me fishing and mushroom hunting. He modeled how to sit quietly and read, shutting the world out. Me shutting my mother’s controlling attention, him shutting out the haranguing notes of my grandmother’s same old tune.

On one of his last car trips my mother took Grandpa, Grandma, me, and my brother to a lake just across the border in Ohio that was one of his favorites. On the way home, he started to feel ill and needed to lay down in the back seat. Mother made my brother and me sit in the front seat with her so Grandpa could lay down. That made four of us packed like surly sardines into the bench front seat of our Studebaker. I was thirteen, entitled, and self-absorbed, typically teenagery and my behavior that followed is something that still brings me shame.

I started to complain that my brother was touching me, looking at me , and breathing on me, existing, basically.  I must have been relentless because I heard my grandpa’s weak voice from the back seat saying to my mother, “Sis, let her get in the back.”  He would never have told me to shut up, which he should have, he just wanted quiet. So he sat up and I returned my selfish self to the back seat where I no longer had to be near to my odious little brother, who was nine and at the mercy of everyone.

Grandpa was my haven, my safe place, my modeler of intentional living. I miss him and his wisdom every day, yet I feel his presence all around me. I wish I could have given him the gift of small comfort that day.  One day I will cross that same border he did and I hope that I can do it with as much grace and love. I will loosen my fist and just let go.

Rebekah Spivey for the Poplar Grove Muse

September 2020