The Great Reunion Beyond
Death is the heartless divider—or so I thought before I watched my grandpa die.
Sarah E. Hinlicky | posted 2/05/2001 12:00AM
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We always knew he loved us. He just had never said it before. Now a conversation never ended without the exchange. Funny how before Grandma had been the one to say these things for him. Now, in the sadness following her death, he drew close to us himself. We loved the closeness. But it meant, in however tiny and unvoiced a way, that there was some sense to Grandma's senseless death. Is that allowed? I wondered. Or maybe, Will I allow it?
Dangerous questions
I not only allowed it, I got obsessed with making sense out of everything. I don't know if it was a lack of faith or a surplus of faith that made me do it—in this frustratingly ambiguous world, probably both. I spent the last year visiting my grandpa every couple of months, every time seeing how much worse he was, not eating, not dressing, his cheeks sinking into his face, his hair standing on end so he looked a little like Einstein. He was on best behavior for me, too; Uncle Mark and Aunt Kathy saw a lot that I didn't.
Yet in the middle of all of this, unprecedented things were happening. Ever since I'd declared my theology major in college, grandpa had not failed to alert me at least once per visit to his reservations about "gals" in the ministry. But sometime in that last year, I guess, he'd forgotten that I'm a "gal" and decided the time would be better spent discussing the meaning of the preaching vocation.
His spontaneous sermons were more like Psalms than Leviticus and never neglected, in his grand old Lutheran way, to put Christ and the Cross squarely in the center. And when these recitations were followed by my reservations about me in the ministry, Grandpa, an ex-Jonah himself, took me with him back to the U.S. Navy of World War II, to his early adulthood formed in battle far from the family, to the death of a dear friend, to the witness of a Catholic chaplain—all of which provoked him into seminary to reclaim his sorely tested faith.
He got rotten grades the first year, treating the academic requirements as incidental to his spiritual purpose, and left that summer with no intention of returning. But we all know how that story ends: God always wins. I learned that, after Koine Greek, Grandpa took up Slovak, not Hebrew, knowing already then that he was called to serve the Slovak-American community that had raised him.
His devotion stretched all the way to the homeland; the last decade of his life was spent translating theological works into Slovak for the believers in the old country, deprived of the freedom of faith that their immigrant brothers and sisters had gained.
Is it dangerous to ask if I would have heard any of this if Grandma were still alive and he were not so lonely without her? Is it presumptuous to wonder if his own knowledge of impending death pushed him to tell me all these things? Dare I look into my own heart and ask if I would have visited so much had I not known that our time together was limited? Maybe even asking exposes a skewed perspective. The fact is that I had these things, these times, and these conversations, and in retrospect they make an awful lot of sense.
I felt a weird possessiveness about my grandpa's death because I was the first one to know it was coming. We all knew, vaguely and unhappily, but I really knew. I drove up to visit him in the hospital (a therapeutic rehabilitation, we were told by the staff, nothing serious) right before taking off for the summer. Nobody visited Grandpa for a while because the hospital was so far away. So nobody else had seen him or warned me of what was coming.
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