Today is my grandmother’s birthday. My mom’s mom. She would’ve been 84 today.
Her name was Myrna which always felt unique and intriguing to me.
I’ve never known anyone else with that name.
Two years ago, when I asked for guidance on a business name, the next thought that came to my mind was to look up what her name meant.
I found that Myrna means beloved and from there she became the Beloved behind Beloved Gateway.
Myrna’s lived experiences have guided my interest in death.
Much like my other grandmother.
I can’t help but feel like they have been guiding this journey the entire time, perhaps seeing a bigger picture that I can not.
I never had a “normal” grandmother experience.
Myrna was sick and my other grandmother was dead.
I used to feel sad about this as a child but now I feel they have both gifted me eternal wisdom.
I feel connected to their spirits and guided by their love.
My childhood consisted of going to the nursing home every week to visit my grandmother. She was wheelchair-bound for decades as M.S. moved through her body.
We would visit her each week as my mom was her caretaker with two young children at home.
Growing up around aging and dying seemed normal to me and at the same time, tugged on my heart and soul as a young girl.
Many of the people there did not have family coming to visit them regularly. I remember how often I would grow fond of someone there only to return the next week to find out they had died.
People would die and a new resident would move in. People would be sick and suffering and it was just a typical day.
Oddly enough, this environment was one of my playgrounds as a kid.
I only realize now how these experiences have influenced my perception of death.
I was 15 when my grandmother died, after decades of navigating Multiple Sclerosis and living in a wheelchair, I saw how death could be a relief.
My mom was my grandmother’s sole caretaker, for her entire life.
They were a team.
They had a bond so deep.
But my grandmother suffered a lot.
They were both tired.
As my mom speaks of this, I can still feel the faint remnants of second guesses surrounding the decisions made for her end-of-life care.
I remind her of the importance of quality of life.
My grandmother left when she no longer had a shred of quality of life left -when her throat muscles were failing and she could no longer breathe or eat on her own without her own saliva entering her lunges.
My mom has shared with me a few times that if she had known her mother’s specific wishes for care at the end of her life, she may have felt less anxious throughout that process and after her death.
She questioned for years if she did the “right thing”.
But my mother always did the best she could to get her the care she deserved.
My mom is truly a warrior in these situations.
Her death reminds me of a fundamental truth that even when death comes to relieve someone of their suffering, grief still arrives.
In my grandmother’s final days in Hospice, my dad - a man of very few words - would go and read to her.
My mom reminded me that my dad and his sister sang a song for my grandmother at her funeral.
Those memories had been tucked away in my teenage brain but I can remember them now when I close my eyes.
As I get older and lean into this work, I realize the importance of continuing to talk about her with my mother.
Each time we bring her up I feel Myrna’s spirit light up.
& talking about her death helps me see the truth of my mother’s heart and how that grief is still present in her and how that grief is full of love.
I share these memories today to honor her and her life.
To honor the fact that her existence has inspired connection and purpose within me.
Her life and death have deep meaning and it’s a meaning that connects us all.
Who’s death are you remembering?
What story can you tell?
Inviting you into the heart to listen for the answer.
xx, Lisa Marie
We, as culture of women, would be remiss to not honor our grandmothers. I've read many times how we are connected to our grandmothers even as our mothers were still in womb - the egg which helped to form us was in our mother's eggs while she was yet a fetus in our grandmother's womb.
If 100% true, which makes sense if we accept the long standing science that we are born with all the eggs* we will ever create, that's quite a connection!
*An article published in 2004 in the Journal Nature, disputes this idea and claims eggs can continue to be produced, but I've not found much else to support the theory (yet).