July 14, 2005
Family Goodbye
Jill Brooks, INTake columnist

My family joined together over the Fourth of July holiday for our maternal grandmother’s funeral. Yes, indeed, she went out with a bang. She’d contracted a virus from a nursing home, and with less than two week’s warning and the obviousness of hospice care, the sobering end came quickly.

After her husband’s death in the 1950s, my sweet grandmother, her screw a little loose, remarried the only grandfather I knew, who came with six children. This gave my mother instant siblings, and legally bound the rest of us to aunts, uncles and cousins we never saw much. My mother tagged funerals with the stepfamily mandatory, while family reunions or holidays remained optional; hereupon, my brother, sister and I crashed only a handful of their social engagements.

I’d said goodbye to my grandmother before she died, but I was in California, on the “guilt trip,” when she passed. There, I spent hours alone and with friends, and saw signs of my grandmother in almost everything: a hummingbird in Hollywood; waves at El Matador beach in Malibu; on actor Peter Saarsgard’s doorstep as I peered over his bushes hoping to catch a glimpse of him in Venice. My grandmother and I shared a knack for curiosity.

When I returned to Indiana, I took the back roads to the funeral in the small town where she’d lived. Verdant fields juxtaposed the smoky blue sky, and Ryan Adams’ singing kept me company. The day was alive and full of memories. I witnessed a dump truck spilling fresh dirt over a patch of wildflowers and I couldn’t bear watching.

After the funeral, our mother’s generation of relatives pulled out old photographs of the family, many dating back to the 1800’s, long before people smiled. The photos were thick, weighted, and all different sizes and textures. Each one was a piece of art. Everyone joined in shuffling through them, and we all appreciated the time my grandmother took in writing in the names of the clan mates.

My generation of siblings and cousins, dwellers in the house of technology, passed around digital cameras. With photos trapped inside, we realized sentimentality got lost on us. My brother said, “How tragic. When we’re old and gray we’ll be passing around old hard drives, saying, ‘Ah, yes, that image is from a memory stick circa 2005….’”

We vowed to return to using film for photographs, to print out and share our pictures, to visit more often and to never, under any circumstance, send our parents to nursing homes.