Tag: family

Carrying Grandma

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My wife’s grandmother died in September of 2004, in her bed, at the end of a long stretch of not being able to eat.

There was a tumor that had closed off her ability to swallow. So she starved, slowly, over days, in her early 80s. Her husband had gone a few years before her and I’ve always believed she was ready to go find him.

When it happened her children were in the room — my mother-in-law, her sisters and brothers. My wife and I weren’t. We’d said our goodbye earlier and gotten to tell her we loved her, which is a thing I’m still grateful we did while she could hear it.

I was twenty-six. We’d been married five years.

Then the men came with the stretcher and couldn’t get it into the bedroom.

I don’t remember the exact geometry of it — a door, a hallway, the way the bed sat. What I remember is standing there while everybody looked at everybody else, and it becoming clear that somebody was going to have to carry her out to where the stretcher could reach.

My mother-in-law asked me.

There’s not much I wouldn’t do for that my mother-in-law. I love her. But I want to be honest about the request, because it was a hard thing to ask, and she asked it anyway, of a twenty-six-year-old who’d been in the family five years. I was ok with it. My wife had a much harder time.

One of my wife’s cousins came in to help. He got a foot, more or less. That isn’t a complaint — I understand it completely and I don’t think he could have done more than he did.

So I picked her up off the bed.

She was not light.

I think people expect that part to go the other way. She’d lost a great deal and she weighed far less than she once had, but she had never been a small woman and she was not a feather in my arms. It took something.

I wasn’t worried about dropping her. I just picked her up and carried her out of the bedroom and into the living room and laid her down on the stretcher. Thirty feet, maybe. Ten seconds of work.

My wife was standing in the living room. She watched the whole thing.

So I set Grandma down, and then I went and put my arms around my wife and told her it was okay.

For her it was awful. I’ve always known that. Her grandmother, her family’s house, and her husband walking through it carrying the body.

For me it was one of the great honors of my life, and I’ve never once been able to explain that to anybody without it sounding strange.

I got to be useful in the one moment where being big and twenty-six was worth something. I’ve spent most of my life being read as more intimidating than I actually am, and here was a room full of people who needed exactly what I’m built like — and I got to lift her carefully, and set her down gently, and step back out of the way.

One of the cousins asked me about it not long ago. Did I remember it.

You don’t forget carrying somebody out. But the part that comes back first isn’t the bedroom or the weight of her. It’s standing in that living room afterward with my arms around my wife.

Ready To Go Home

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Last full day at sea. Tomorrow we’re in port, then an airport, then home.

And I have to admit something I’ve never once been able to say at the end of one of these.

I’m ready to go.

Every other cruise I’ve taken has ended with me dragging my feet up the gangway. The last day was always a countdown to reentry — back to the bills, the yard, dinner that doesn’t cook itself, the whole apparatus of being responsible for things.

Out here I got to be free and easy for a week. No clock. Nothing I had to achieve that I didn’t want to.

I have loved it. I’ve eaten more than I needed to and enjoyed every bite. Desserts. A couple of very good wines. Places I’ve never been. A whole lot of time staring at water, which I’ll be doing again in about an hour.

And I still want to go home.

What’s different is that there’s something waiting that I actually want.

I’ve spent this year working harder than I’ve worked in a long time, on purpose, on things that are mine. Which means home isn’t a pile of obligations this time. It’s a set of things I’m in the middle of and want to get back into the middle of.

I’m in the gym Sunday with my son. Monday morning I’ll get coffee, sit down, and start digging through what I’d conservatively estimate is five thousand emails. Then follow-ups with my team on what moved while I was gone, and figuring out what the next project needs from me.

None of that sounds like dread when I say it out loud. It sounds like Monday, and I’d like to get at it.

I’m not naive about how fast this turns.

It’ll be a grind again inside of two weeks. There will be a list, and deadlines, and people who needed something from me before I got back to my desk, and bills, and all the ordinary weight of a life. Restored is a temporary condition.

The stairs on this ship have also made a point I didn’t ask them to make. I’m in decent shape. I’m not in the shape I want. Something to work on.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, though.

I brought my mid-year review with me. I’ve been saying all week I’d open it on the last sea day, block out a couple of hours, sit somewhere quiet and figure out the back half of the year.

I never opened it.

My son wanted to do trivia in the theater. Then karaoke, where he got up and sang How to Save a Life and absolutely leveled the room — this kid who started out with an untrained ear, standing up in front of strangers and just owning it. I watched him meet people all week and turn into somebody more outgoing than I’ve ever seen him.

The review will still be there Sunday afternoon. It has kept for six weeks; it’ll keep two more days.

I would not trade one hour of that theater for it.

A Hundred Feet

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Standing off the back of a ship at night in the middle of the ocean is the strangest feeling I know.

The deck lights throw a haze that hangs out over the water, a kind of halo, and inside it you can see about a hundred feet of wake — white foam churned up and rolling out behind you. Past that the light quits. The foam goes on for a while and then it’s just gone into black, and you have no idea how far down or how far out any of it goes.

It’s dark. It’s enormous. It’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever stood in front of and I could look at it for hours.

I’ve only been on the ocean a handful of times in my life. Every time I leave it I miss it more than I did before.

I’ve started to suspect we don’t come out here for the islands at all. The islands are wonderful and I’d go back to some of them tomorrow. But there’s a real chance we book these trips just to spend a few days out in the middle of the water with land nowhere in any direction.

There’s a parallel here about my life and I’ve been resisting it, because it doesn’t hold as cleanly as I’d like.

The easy version is that I love being out in the middle of things. Which is true — I like being in the thick of the work, in the middle of the struggle, some days with no clear idea where I am, and I’ve built a life that keeps me there most of the time.

But I also like the shore. A lot. I like knowing there’s a place I can get back to.

Anybody who tells you they only want one of those is selling something.

Every post I write ends up back at my faith, and this one gets there faster than most.

I believe in a God who spoke and there was a universe. Who said something on each of those days and something new existed that had never existed before, and who is, at a level I can’t get to the bottom of, an artist.

There’s a whole industry devoted to bringing people out here comfortably. Good food, entertainment, somebody making the bed. And all of that apparatus succeeded tonight in putting me in exactly one position, which was standing at a rail in the dark with my knees going out from under me, understanding how small I am.

I’m very small. The ocean is very large. And the God who made it is larger than the ocean.

Tomorrow’s a sea day and I’m going to sit down with the review I’ve been carrying and start planning the back half of my year.

I’ll be doing it on top of about three miles of water I can’t see the bottom of.

Tonight, though, I’m just looking at the wake. A hundred feet of it lit up, rolling away, and then nothing I can see at all.

Passenger

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I love watching people, and a ship is about the best place I’ve found to do it.

Everybody converges. Nationalities I couldn’t place, accents I can’t identify, families three generations deep at one table. Old people moving slow and full of life. Kids running where they shouldn’t. Somebody loud at the bar who wants the whole deck in on the joke, and somebody else at the rail by himself who clearly does not.

And once you sit with it a while the differences stop being the interesting part, because everybody out here wants the same four or five things. Their people around them. Something good to eat. A game to play. A stretch of time where nothing is difficult.

That’s it. That’s the whole list, and it’s the same list in every language on this boat.

What I can’t stop doing is wondering about the faces.

Is this just a vacation, or is somebody escaping something? Is that man dreading the flight home, or is he going back to a life he genuinely likes? Did this cost them nothing or did it cost them a year of saving?

I’ll never know any of it. I’ll pass four thousand people this week and I won’t learn one story.

Which turned the question back on me, sitting there.

What am I in all of this? A man who loves his family. A man who’s been given considerably more than he’s earned and knows it.

And a man who is finally, actually relaxing — for the first time in a long time. I’ve been on the clock for months. Longer than months. There’s been a thing to achieve every single day for most of this year and a good part of the years before it.

Out here I’ve found rest just looking at the water. The size of it. A thing I did not make and cannot influence in any direction, doing what it’s done for a very long time without any input from me.

The other piece of it is that I’m a passenger.

I’m not driving this. I don’t know the route. Somebody far more qualified than me is getting us from one place to the next, and other people are cooking, and other people are running the whole apparatus, and my job is to be aboard.

I’m not built for that. I have spent this entire year building systems so that I’m the one holding the thing together. And here I am with no responsibility for any of it, breathing all the way down for the first time in a while.

It turns out I can do it. That’s useful information about myself that I did not have last week.

I was saying most of this out loud into my phone when caught my attention, smiled, and told me good morning.

So I’m not really watching them. I’m one of the faces.

Four thousand stories under one roof, and I don’t know a single one of them. But the God who made me and loves me did exactly the same for every person on this ship.

That’ll do for a Monday.

Three Hundred Dollars

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The summer after my freshman year I called my grandmother from a pay phone and asked her for three hundred dollars.

I was already on the mission trip when I made the call. The arrangement had been seven or eight hundred for the summer, some of it up front — except none of it came up front. It all came at the end. I could not make the leaders understand that college students still have bills that show up monthly whether you’re at camp or not.

Mine were a credit card minimum payment and a Sprint phone card, and the phone card was because I kept calling a girl in Oklahoma City from that camp. She’s been my wife for twenty-seven years.

I called my mother first to ask whether Grandma would even consider it. She said, for you, I think she probably would.

So I called Duncan.

She got quiet. Not upset — the kind of quiet where somebody is taking in what you’ve just asked and has decided not to react until they’ve finished thinking about it. Then she said, that’s some money.

She was right. She was a nurse who’d raised four daughters, married to an oil man, and they had means. She’d never once spent like it.

She didn’t mail it. I had to come get it.

So I told my leaders I had bills to pay and drove ninety minutes from Davis to Duncan, and she put cash in my hand at the house she’d lived in my entire life.

I told her I’d pay her back at the end of the summer. I told her she had my word.

The check came in August. I was in Edmond by then.

I drove back down to Duncan — a weekend, knowing me. I called first. I’ve never been a man who shows up unannounced.

I put the bills in her hand and told her thank you.

She said thank you too. And she got a look on her face I have never been able to name properly — pleased and proud and satisfied, all of it at once, all at the same time.

Grandpa was out mowing, I think. I stayed long enough for pie or brownies or cake, whatever she had, and visited a while, and drove back to the city.

Thirteen years later she was dying at home, in that same house.

A few weeks out, I arranged to come spend a morning with her. She sat in her sitting room with her legs kicked out and her pain medication beside her, and we talked for a good while. Two of my aunts were there. I made breakfast for all of us, and I got to show off a little, and I told her about my family — my son was five that year. He’s eighteen now.

At some point my aunts stepped out and it was just the two of us.

I told her I loved her and that I was thankful for her. I read her a letter I’d written for her.

And she watched me the whole time with that same look. The one from the money.

That was the last time I saw her.

I’ll be forty-eight before long, and I still miss my grandma and being looked at that way. She loved me. I love her.

She never said a word about the three hundred dollars.