My Grandpa passed away in February. I knew it was coming, as did the rest of my family. Boppy, as his grandchildren called him, was a joyful, hardworking man who loved his family. He’d been on dialysis for I don’t know how many years (far longer than what was usually expected, thanks to the meticulous and gentle care of my grandma, Nanny)
Three days before his passing, when he was struggling to speak and his consciousness was failing, my mom reported that he had been mumbling three words.
“Three more days.”
Three days later, he passed away in the night, and I was woken that morning by my brother-in-law. The funeral director needed help getting Boppy out of his room. The stretcher wouldn’t fit down the hall.
It was a silent drive to my parents’ house. Nanny and Boppy had moved in with them when he’d begun to require more care. My brother-in-law, a pastor, might’ve said something evangelical about how death sucks on the short drive. I can’t remember. I was just thinking about how I needed to get through this. He asked if this would be my first dead body. I said yes. He said he was sorry.
We entered the house and greeted the FD. We went into Boppy’s room. He was covered with a sheet. The plan was to use the sheet to carry him into the living room and get him situated on the stretcher. Then the FD’s assistant said my mom, who was in her bedroom with my grandma and aunt and various other female family members, had asked for me.
My stomach dropped. I kinda knew what was about to happen. I went to see her. She and everyone else in the room were a wreck. I hugged her, and she squeezed and refused to let go. She said I needed to stay back there with her. She didn’t want me to see Boppy like this. My grandma and aunt repeated her pleas.
And in that moment, I had a choice. I could stay with the woman and children in the backroom, or I could carry my Boppy out of the house and into the next life.
There were no children in the bedroom. Just my twenty-five-year-old self and the woman of my family.
I made the difficult choice.
I told my mom it was okay, that I needed to help move him, and that I would be okay. To my surprise, she didn’t really fight me. She let me go.
We got Boppy out of his room fine, got him on the stretcher, and walked him out to the hearse (a nondescript white van).
I don’t really remember what took place between then and the funeral. There was a lot of sitting with family and eating and sitting alone and thinking.
I am a Christian, and so I took comfort in my belief that Boppy was now in heaven with the Lord. I took comfort in the thought of seeing him again in heaven, and, ultimately, seeing him again on an earth made new with a resurrected body like that of our Lord. It was a bitter-sweet sorrow. I thought of how I wish I’d known him better. I thought of my own faults and sins.
I’d been to funerals before, but somehow this one felt different. My grandma (Dad’s side), whom we referred to as Me-Me, passed away during the COVID lockdowns. We had her funeral outside in the local park at the splash pad. Plastic neon tubes in wacky shapes spiraled above my head as I played guitar to accompany my sister who sang a hymn. We all laughed at the rather unorthodox situation. Me-Me wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Maybe it was just that I was older now, or that I’d spent this last winter also living with my parents, and thus saw Boppy every day. Regardless, this funeral was different. More solemn. I remember sitting in the prayer room at church with the rest of the family, waiting for the funeral to begin. A cousin of mine was there, and we briefly touched on the strangeness of it all. The ritual of the funeral.
We have very little true ritual in our lives these days—and I’m not talking about your morning routine or what you do before you write or your personal spiritual devotions. I’m talking about corporate ritual; the gathering of souls for a specific, religious or cultural experience. Something about ritual makes people uncomfortable, I think. It truly is foreign to us moderns. I feel that what rituals remain: certain services, ceremonies, graduations, etc, we tend to drown in either irony or deprecating acknowledgment of the inherent ‘silliness’ of the ritual. In our materialistic age, no matter how ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ one might claim to be, there lingers a discomfort when attending such rituals — none-so-more than a funeral; nothing fries the circuitry of our modern minds quite like a confrontation with Death.
Regardless, the funeral itself went well. I enjoyed it, which I know is a strange thing to say about a funeral. But I did. There truly was so much love and hope in that room amidst the sorrow. I was asked countless times some variation of, “How are you doing?” I always answered with some version of, “I’m fine,” or, “As good as I can.”
My sister Ciara Brooke Reese sang a hymn, and ended it with the tagline of one of our band’s songs.
I can hear you say, Do not be afraid. I can hear you say, Hold on one more day. Now is not always.
I rode with my family to the graveside. Boppy was to be buried in Kaw City, where he and my grandma had spent most of their lives (at least in my living memory)
I was a pallbearer, so when we arrived, I got out of the car and waited at the back of the hearse. When the time came, I helped carry him to his grave and then stood with my family for the ceremony.
Boppy got a military sendoff. Not the full twenty-one gun salute—something was said about the military only doing that for active service members these days.
But to finally get to the point of this article, this retelling of a sorrow-filled day, there was something that happened that struck me at the graveside. One of the soldiers in attendance began to play Taps on the trumpet, those mournful notes ringing out across the cemetery. This wasn’t a TV funeral; this was an Oklahoma funeral. Men and woman in cowboy boots took off their cowboy hats beneath a warm February sun as a gentle breeze blew across the plains and tickled my stuffy nose with its allergen-riddled air. All stood in silence as the song was played. I remember how bright everything felt. The song ended, but the spell continued as the flag was folded. The soldiers worked with precision and grace. The lead soldier approached my grandma with the flag, kneeling down to present it to her. He thanked her for Boppy’s service. Neither he nor the other soldier in attendance ever broke, their faces stoic and strong—that is, until my grandma thanked the soldier and told him, “God bless you.”
He smiled warmly at those words.
I felt like I saw something at my Boppy’s graveside. Something true that we’ve forgotten. Something true about America, about what she really is, or at least strives to be. What we all strive to be. I still think about it. I will continue to think about it
We are haunted not only by the shadows of our fallen nature, but by the light, our light, that casts the shadow.
This is an abrupt ending, but I haven’t much more to say, aside from this.
God bless you.
Beautiful
I loved this Brody. Made me cry because I’ve been there. Very well said. ❤️