Church Floors

My grandmother died two Tuesdays ago. August 30th. After the funeral her kids chose a sticky note color and claimed the things they each wanted from her house. Art and memorabilia were pulled out of copious file folders as my aunt rummaged through her nightstand to find her wedding band. My grandmother’s calendar was on the table, unclaimed and full of slash marks through the days leading up until she went to the hospital, which was two days after my brother and dad had visited her (notated in her calendar, and slashed through). 

I went up to the storage room of the attic, where I claimed a photo album and a couple letters my grandmother had written to Grandpa back in the sixties. The album was labeled “Wedding and Graduation.” The dust that had settled into the furniture quieted any noise of the company downstairs. The attic was entirely untouched by sticky notes. It had been entirely untouched since before my grandfather passed away five years ago. His left handed notebook was still open on his desk, filled with neat writing he must have done when his hand was steadier. 

When Grandpa died, Grandma let him go to the hospital alone. I picture the moment the overnight nurse called 911. Grandpa wouldn’t have been able to tell her his chest hurt, but he must have made a pained expression or a gesture towards his heart. I picture the EMTs arriving and whisking him off. I want to imagine they told Grandma he’d be fine, that she should stay home and rest. I don’t want to imagine that she made the decision to stay home herself. I find myself unable to forgive her for the latter option, though I think it’s more likely. The day he died, I stayed home from school sick. It was as if my body intuitively knew something was wrong. My grandmother must have felt that, too- she must have intuitively known he was dying. But she didn’t go with him, and I never had the courage to ask her why, because I think I wouldn’t forgive myself for learning the answer. She never brought him up on her own, and I didn’t intend to cause her pain by bringing him up for my own selfish sake of getting closure on his death. By the time it was pestering me enough to ask, she wouldn’t have been able to tell me the answer, anyways. 

Her obituary had a youthful photo of her, four sentences about her, and two about the funeral and where to send flowers. Four sentences. That’s one for every twenty-one years of her life. I am twenty-one years old. I look nothing like she did when she was twenty-one. My grandmother was gorgeous. She had a pointy nose and perfectly arched eyebrows and, in my favorite picture of her from the album I claimed, she is standing on the beach with her dark shoulder length hair being whipped around by the wind. She married before she graduated college, so she must be about my age in the photo. I got my brown eyes and hair from my paternal grandfather. And his Jewish nose. I look a lot like my cousin on my dad’s side. Although my face is rounder, which I don’t like. I received my maternal grandmother’s anxiety, and from my paternal grandmother I got a love for music, a love letter she wrote my grandfather, and a gorgeous picture of her when she was young. But I look nothing like either of my grandmothers, and so I struggle with my own image and forgiving my round face and boring brown eyes. I wonder if one of my obituary sentences will just be “She never figured out forgiveness.”

When I was in sixth grade, I sat in the dim sitting area outside the sanctuary at Friendship United Methodist Church, talking about forgiveness with a group of young girls. We sat on the floor and I hugged my knees close to my chest. The big windows to the courtyard had blanketed the hall with chilly air. I don’t actually remember being in sixth grade for this, I just know when I became a counselor for that same event when I was older and in high school, I led a group of sixth graders. I remember sitting with them in an upstairs classroom in the church discussing forgiveness and thinking to myself how our age gap was not significant enough for me to be adequately leading them, because I was still a child myself, still learning how to forgive. 

I just turned twenty-one. I just had my first taste of alcohol. Good Christian girl raised by a good Christian mother, I vowed to myself I would never drink. A friend angered me last semester and, though I forgave him, I decided I was too generous in that choice. I was angry at myself for letting him walk on me. I was questioning what made a friend worth a friendship. When I told him my grandmother had died he was quiet, and I was angry at him for it. So last week I thought about “forgive” and its counterpart “forget” and figured if I couldn’t forgive him I could at least try to forget, and the easiest route to do so as a college student is to take your almost-alcoholic-friend’s offer to make you an alcoholic by the end of the semester. So the two of us sat on her bed and she offered me a glass and I complained I could only taste orange juice and is that what alcohol is supposed to taste like? So she added more vodka and I still only tasted orange juice so I drank the whole glass, then another, (still didn’t taste like what I expected alcohol to) and so then I asked for a straight shot, which was awful, but tasted like what I expected alcohol to taste like. I took the shot moments before my forgiven/not forgiven friend showed up to drive me home, which I had requested in advance as I assumed I’d be drunk. Yet I was, disappointingly, not drunk, and instead I was soberly aware of every minute of the car ride back, wishing I were drunk so I could scream at him about how I didn’t forgive him (because I hadn’t adequately learned about forgiveness in sixth grade, and because I wish he had been there for me when my grandmother died two Tuesdays ago).

I think we instead spoke on that ride back about the mundane: our days and our homework. But in my memory of those eleven minutes home, silence plays a larger role than talking. I stared up at the stars out the window while his gray eyes stayed fixed on the road. I remember the pain of my chosen silence in my chest, overflowing with the anger I felt towards him and the weight of my own regret about forgiving him last semester.

I thought about how a younger version of myself would probably have prayed in that moment for clarity or forgiveness or empathy or any other combination of feelings marketed as “warm and fuzzy.” But I am now disconnected from my mother’s religion, in which I was raised, and no longer feel drawn to prayer. Just before I left for college I processed the unforgivable politics of the Methodist Church and hesitatingly removed myself. I hope my mother can forgive me for doing this. I know my grandmother hasn’t. I’m not sure if I have. Maybe if I had paid more attention to that discussion about “forgiveness in the Christian faith” in sixth grade, I would be able to forgive myself for leaving the Christian faith. Maybe I should ask God for forgiveness in the purple prayer journal I received for confirmation in sixth grade. I was never connected to my father’s religion because he wasn’t either. When the Rabbi spoke in Hebrew at grandma’s funeral, we all just nodded along politely. But my paternal grandparents weren’t religious, so I find it easy to forgive myself for my lack of bilingualism here. From her coffin, I’m sure my grandmother had no idea what the Rabbi was saying, either. But on that ride home after drinking, I had no spiritual guide with which to speak besides the stars glinting outside the window. 

By the time we arrived at my doorstep, my tongue was too weighed down to talk. I opened the passenger side door and locked eyes with him, considering sharing that I had been drinking. He knew I had vowed to never drink. Instead, I thanked him for the ride, and went inside to go to bed. In my room upstairs, a picture of my late grandmother sat pinned to my bulletin board along with a note she wrote my grandfather. I marveled at it, wondering how I failed my sixth grade self so much to let a moment of [lack of] forgiveness define me. How I had ended up sitting on the floor of a college apartment missing a friend who was just outside and missing a woman for whom I had so many questions. My bedroom floor seemed far from the floor of Friendship United Methodist Church. I wish I could tell that little girl that forgiveness is not so cut and dry as her group leaders may seem it to be. I think she would be disappointed in me, though, for letting anger sit on me so heavily and for leaving our religion. So, instead, I have to forgive myself for growing up and thinking forgiveness would come so easily.