Skywriting

The late summer New Hampshire sky grows dark and heavy. It's about to rain. At our childhood home, my mom and sister Elissa work in the kitchen preparing a meal for the twenty-one people who have gathered from Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Chicago and Colorado for one reason--to remember the woman we all share in common. Some of us call her Mom and some Nana. But all of us called her ours. She passed from this world this past May, at breakfast, less than twenty-four hours after my sister Kait and I gave her one last hug and promised we'd see her soon. The only one of us present the moment she slipped away was her daughter, my aunt Gail. Just as she would have wanted. No fuss. Her best friend at her side. She was 90.

While the clouds collect outside, family members pour into my parents' living room, kitchen and dining room, many just arriving. We greet and hug each other a little longer than usual, then pass around small talk--how big the kids are getting, when school starts up again, work life. Above the chatter, we can hear the thrum of rain on the windows and roof. Then just as quickly as it started, the rain eases. Steam rises off the deck, and fog slips low along the mountains. 

"My gosh! Look at that!" someone cries from the center of it all. "There's a rainbow! Sara, Meg, Liss, Kait, a rainbow. Ray, come see! Cathy! Look, you guys. Gail! Tim! Cooper! Look at that! Doug, Emily! Kids! Look!" All twenty-one of us squeeze onto the deck, while the rain softly tapers, and look out over the backyard. Sure enough. Over Belknap and Gunstock Mountains stretches the thickest, brightest rainbow most of us have ever seen. Every color in the spectrum clearly defined--radiant, glowing, full. So large we can't take it in in a single glance, but instead must follow its long and lovely arch with our gaze, east to west and back again.

"Hi there, Nana," I whisper too quiet for anyone to hear. I'm not that superstitious. I don't really imagine that my grandmother is hiding on the other end of the rainbow like a pot of gold, just out of sight. Still. In the hum of a hush that settles over us, there is something palpable and true. We have all witnessed it. This sign. This gift.

My youngest sister Megan and I lean against one another at the deck rail and inhale the rich, humus air and sigh out all that gratitude that's full up in us. Grace is always more than we can ask for.

The next day we gather again, draw our chairs in a circle and my dad talks first. Through tears, he talks of the newly-born peace he saw in his mom during the last month of her life, a peace he'd never noticed before. Everyone takes a turn. All the things we saw in her final days. All the lessons she taught us over the years. All the pain and strength and beauty her one life held. "I'm not afraid of death, anymore," she told my sister Kait on our last visit. And she wasn't. She left this world wearing that quiet peace she'd put on like a beautiful garment those last days, months, years.

Later, we set platters of food on tables under a red umbrella, spoon heaping piles of potato salad and coleslaw and thick watermelon slices on our plates, roll corn in butter, and crack lobster shells, spraying their briny liquid on each other and laughing. "Who likes the green stuff?" someone asks. "Not me!" I scrape tomalley off my lobster meat and feed it to the dog who laps it from my hands hungrily. After lunch, the guys play endless rounds of corn hole while tiny feet pound across the yard hunting for "a stick as long as your arm" on a wild-eyed scavenger hunt. Little bodies wriggle in and out of three hammocks strung between pine trees, while the air chills and sweatshirts come out. As the day dims, we find ourselves bundled on the beach waiting for a sunset that stays hidden behind a single swath of dark clouds perched stubbornly on the horizon. Frisbees come out instead and we throw three at a time, between us. Then someone calls it a day, and we all pile in to four vehicles and head back to the house.

I could have stayed there for days, in that space, with my people, her people, because it was exactly the way she would have wanted it. All of us together, loving on each other, bound by more than blood. Bound by our shared loss but also our shared joy.

The older I get, the more I realize the way joy and pain so often dwell side-by-side. And that there really isn't anywhere we can be that He isn't: no pain that his Son didn't already endure, no joy that the Father didn't himself create for us, no space too small or insignificant for the Spirit to show up and whisper "faithful" into our doubt-filled and waiting hearts.

In her last years, my Nana reminded me of the old man in Ecclesiastes, the narrator who lived all his days striving and toiling only to realize all of it was meaningless. "I don't have anything to give you," my Nana would say--she who spoke love our whole lives through the sometimes quirky gifts she adored giving us. When we asked her what we could bring her in the nursing home, she'd wave us off. "I don't care about anything, anymore. I don't need anything." But we brought her the things we knew she loved, anyway. Pale pink nail polish for a manicure, chicken salad, raspberries, white gardenias, and soft, drapey dresses.

As a kid, I found Ecclesiastes terribly depressing and really, incomprehensible. But just like my Nana, the narrator of Ecclesiastes isn't upset that there isn't anything new under the sun; on the contrary, he finally sees what matters. As fun as it was to open gifts from Nana, her greatest gift was seven simple words, spoken close to our ears every time we reached down to her walker or wheelchair to press a kiss onto her soft cheek. "Love each other," she said each time we parted ways. "Have a good life."

We'd laugh at her. "Have a good life? We'll see you again!" we'd protest. But I think she said it just in case. The last time I saw her, she held me close. "You know I love you," she said, her voice barely a whisper by then. I held her as long as I could, not knowing that it was for the last time.

My grandmother was beautiful, smart, strong-willed and resilient. True, she was imperfect like the rest of us, but she lived her final days with dignity, grace, and wisdom. That rainbow written across the sky was a promise and a reminder both. She would have loved its simple beauty. She would have loved the way it drew all of us out of ourselves and closer to one another.

Goodbye just for now, Nana. We'll see you soon.