I had never been in a house where someone had recently died.
I had never, really, known anyone who had died.
At least not anyone I was close to.
I was in college, driving the hour-plus from the north side of Atlanta down to the south every week or so to do work for my aunt and make ends meet. All of my family lived on the southside, including my two sets of grandparents. Stopping in to see one or both was a routine part of my trip.
But this trip was different.
The Big Chief
My mother’s father had been battling every health problem imaginable. He had long lived under the shadow of rheumatoid arthritis with one of the worst cases anyone had ever seen. That’s not according to me. His autoimmunity was so pronounced that doctors at Emory wrote about him in clinical literature.
The wild thing about my grandfather’s health journey was that it didn’t slow him down. I know he was in pain and badly deformed from his disease, but he seemed mostly in motion to me. Traveling extensively up until the last two years of his life, when his health forced him into hospitals.
My grandmother told me he had risen to the rank of Chief Master Sergeant in the Air Force faster than any enlisted man before him. She also revealed, almost as an aside, that an early flare in his twenties had paralyzed him physically for two weeks, and he had been completely dependent on her.
Eventually, his body forced him into early retirement because he could no longer reliably pull the trigger on his gun. Not something you’d want to be cursed with as a military policeman. But even upon Air Force retirement, he had work to do. He held a senior post at Dobbins Air Force Base, over the Chief of Police, in my grandmother’s telling, although I still don’t know his exact title. What I do know is he coordinated Air Force One across multiple administrations.
I’ve seen the letters and the photographs from Johnson, Nixon, and Ford.
What I remember most about him, though, was far less storied.
He’d watched The Young and the Restless every day, followed by eating a sandwich for lunch—Miracle Whip, never Mayo. Then he’d pick me up early from daycare so we could spend the afternoon together. A funny thing to recount about a man whose subordinates called him Big Chief.
But I can’t fathom what it must have been like to fall from the ranks of that position to soap operas and sandwiches every day.
I remembered the way he would take my little hands into his and study them. His own hands looked like the gnarled roots of an old tree, twisted by violent storms, or rather by years of extreme joint damage. Mine were small and smooth. He’d hold them like he was trying to remember how young hands actually worked. But even his twisted hands didn’t fully stop him. He traveled to all fifty states, and that was after all his deployments to places like Germany, Japan, and Morocco. He had his car outfitted with one of those knobs for easier steering, and off he’d go with my grannie. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, my mom called these jaunts. To biker weddings or gambling in Las Vegas. My grandparents were wild ramblers. More recently, my grannie told me that in the 1990s, they’d drive down to Disney World, not for rollercoasters or tea cups, but to rent the Disney scooters and joyride all over the park.
A small escape into freedom for a body so thoroughly imprisoned by itself.
Big Chief, it turns out, was also a Disney Adult. Who knew? One more hilarious contradiction I had never considered.
How Time Moves
But on this visit, things were different.
The night before, I had visited him in the hospital, and he was no longer speaking. After kissing him on the cheek, I left to stay with my father’s parents before planning my usual work trip down to my aunts. Normally, when I stayed with them, I slept in their spare room. But for some reason that night, I decided to sleep on the couch instead. I had felt spooked around midnight when I spotted a strange shadow pass across the front door, and I didn’t want to be locked away in the back room. So I dragged a pillow and blanket into the living room where I could sleep in front of the television and let the noise distract me.
The next morning, I was in earshot as I woke to hear my other grandfather answer the phone. My father’s father was clearly talking to my mother. Even groggy from sleep, it was abundantly clear: my Pawpaw had passed in the night.
He died at 12:01 AM.
Yes, he possessed enough spunk to get that extra minute in to claim one more day. That you can be certain of.
But there wasn’t time to reflect on his passing or even the shadow I saw the night before. My mother and grandmother had to get to the funeral home to finalize details, and they needed me. Not at my aunt’s house, as I’d planned, but at my grannie’s house, where I could answer the door for the neighbors who would inevitably arrive bearing food.
So that’s what I did.
I drove to my grandparents’ home. And after my mother and grandmother left for the funeral home, I stood there in the living room, alone.
The Quiet Room
I’d never been in this house by myself before.
It was unnervingly quiet.
That was the part I couldn’t get over. My grandparents always yelled at each other because my grandfather refused to wear his hearing aids and my grandmother refused to lower her voice on principle. The house had a liveliness to it, the banter of old people pushing each other’s buttons.
But that was gone now.
The doorbell rang, and I answered it. It was a neighbor I half-recognized who handed me a casserole and a card and left. I carried the dish into the kitchen. And the doorbell rang again.
Another neighbor. Another casserole. Another small condolence.
By the third casserole, the house settled down and fully exposed its silence to me. No more neighbors. At least, not for now. And I sat not with emptiness exactly, just Silence.
I had never had anyone close to me die before. I didn’t know what to make of the noiseless space. But it felt unusual. Present in a way I had never noticed. As though the very air itself was arranging the grief.
I felt spooked, so I did what any self-respecting twenty-something does when a room becomes too thick to breathe in.
I turned on the TV just as I had done the night before.
The Middle Ground
The Twilight Zone was on.
I had seen most of the episodes, but not this one.
“Nothing in the Dark.” Originally aired January 5, 1962.
An old woman lives in a basement apartment and won’t leave it, even refusing to open the door to guests, in case Death comes for her. She has spent decades shrinking the world down to the size of this single locked space.
Then a young police officer is shot just outside her door. He falls, bleeding, and pleads with her to let him in. The actor is, of course, a young Robert Redford, who possessed the kind of handsome that could rearrange a person’s principles quickly. He begs to be let in. And the old woman finally obliges, breaking her one rule.
I mean, it was hot young Robert Redford.
Once he is inside, she figures out what she has done.
She has, in fact, let Death in. He admits it. He tells her he had to trick her to gain her trust. Her building will be demolished within the hour anyway.
She wants to fight against this realization. I don’t want to die, she says.
He extends his hand to her and calls her mother.
And something in her softens. She takes his hand and asks, “When will it happen? When will we go?”
He tells her to look.
As she turns towards her bed, she sees herself, just her body, already lying peacefully as if she’s asleep.
“We’ve already begun,” he says.
And the two of them walk out of the apartment together, hand in hand.
A Message from the Other Side
That was the moment, sitting on my dead grandfather’s couch in his too-quiet house, that I felt comfort.
I knew this old TV show was a message from my Pawpaw, just as the shadow across the door the night before also was.
He was at peace. Death had already happened, quietly, hand in hand, and there was nothing in this silent house to fear.
Big Chief had walked out, in his own way. And he was no longer in pain.
Between Two Worlds
I’ve been thinking about that day for years now, but only recently have I had the language for what I was actually standing inside of that morning.
A threshold.
I don’t mean it metaphorically as I did in my article Standing on the Threshold. I mean it almost architecturally. I had been answering a real door, taking casseroles across an actual sill, while standing inside a house that had become, in the night, a threshold itself. A place that was no longer entirely here and not exactly anywhere else.
A place where the membrane had thinned.
Some cultures have a name for this.
The Jewish mark a door with a mezuzah.
The Celts call it thin places.
Locations where the veil between worlds wears so soft that you can almost see through. Traditionally, these were geographical: particular hills, a special well, or specific shorelines. But I have come to believe that thresholds aren’t only places. They’re moments. Hours. Rooms in the wake of something. The first quiet morning of a death.
Liminality is the term anthropologists use for it, from the Latin limen, meaning ‘threshold’. The state of being on the doorstep. Neither fully on one side nor fully on the other. A bride at the altar. A boy at his bar mitzvah.
A granddaughter on the porch of her grandfather’s house, holding a tuna casserole and trying to figure out where to put it.
In many traditions, the veil is not a wall.
It’s more like a curtain, and curtains, by their nature, move. They thin, billow, and part. The old woman in “Nothing in the Dark” spent her whole life trying to nail her curtain shut. What she discovered, in the end, was that the curtain isn’t the enemy. The curtain is the kindness. It is what lets us cross over without having to look at the whole truth at once.
The Irish Poet
Years before I stood in my grandfather’s quiet house, I had stood at Yeats’s grave.
In Sligo at Drumcliff churchyard, Benbulben rises behind his headstone like a verdict. The epitaph is one of the most famous in poetry, and Yeats wrote it himself:
Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by.
I had read his poems and even taught them to classes of high school students. But standing under that mountain, I understood, for the first time, why people insist some places are more porous. Why the Celts bothered to give thin places a name. The air there had a hand in it, too.
After we’d read “The Second Coming,” I’d have my students listen to The Police song “Synchronicity II.” I’d explain that Sting, like Yeats before him, was reaching for mythic language by feeling the membrane go thin.
The beast is slouching while something is being born in the dark.
The center cannot hold.
That is a thin place, too.
The kind that doesn’t come hand in hand. The kind that arrives distorted.
I taught my students to understand. I hope they still feel it, fifteen years later, when that song comes on the radio.
And I had felt it myself at midnight before my grandfather died, when a shadow moved past the door, and I dragged my pillow out to the couch and refused to be locked in the back room. That wasn’t exactly a ghost story. It was the beast slouching past the window on its way to take a man who had spent his whole life refusing to let pain control him.
The other threshold came in the morning.
Hand in hand. With a casserole and a black-and-white Robert Redford TV show. That one I keep coming back to, just as I do this line from Yeats’ “The Stolen Child”:
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Hand in hand, the same image.
Yeats wrote it in 1886. Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone broadcast was in 1962. I felt it in a quiet house in the early 2000s. The image keeps surfacing because the image is true. Crossings, when they come gently, show up this way. Not snatched or in violence.
Yeats spent his whole life writing toward both faces of the thin place—the slouching beast and the small lake island where the bee-loud glade hums and the heart finally stops shaking. He understood that the veil parts in two directions.
Sometimes it parts to terrify.
Sometimes it parts to walk you home.
My grandfather got both. The dread of the night before, the gentleness in the morning. Most of us, I suspect, do.
The world is more full of weeping than we can understand. My grandfather’s body knew that better than most. Every joint of him had been arguing with the world for decades. He had a body that should have stopped him from doing anything, and he drove it across all fifty states and into Disney World to ride a rented scooter anyway.
When the hand finally extended to him at 12:01, I have to believe he took it the way he took everything else.
With one extra minute of spunk and a story to tell on the other side.
We sit so close to death in so much of our living spaces.
We just keep the curtain closed.
Sometimes a casserole, a quiet house, and a black-and-white Robert Redford show come along to part it for a moment, gently, so we can see what has actually been on the other side all along.
Hand in hand.
Nothing in the dark.
If you missed last week’s trip to the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston, you can read When You Think Life is Over now.
Next week, I’ll conclude the Death Series with a unique way you can identify and honor your own legacy while life is still very much happening to you.