my (im)perfect eulogy

This picture is posed, not candid.  She was not really a cuddly grandma, though I think she would have liked to be, wanted the world to see her this way, even if it wasn't her nature.  I remember sitting for these pictures when my mom was starting her child care business (Janet's House).  Mom (or likely dad) wanted a picture to put on the flyers.  My grandparents supported my mom in so many small and big ways.  They moved to Bayfield around the same time my mom opened her daycare and helped with it's operation as well as being there to help with my brothers and I.  Any time any of us travelled, they gave us a card with extra money so we could experience where we were beyond just getting ourselves there.  

I wrote the following in 2017 in an email to a few of my closest friends.  I thought maybe I would edit it into a blogpost at some point, but I never had it in me, or got to it, but I returned to it today and realized it doesn't need any editing.  It is my (im)perfect eulogy to the (im)perfect woman who was my Grandma Heist:

My grandma died early Friday and I've been struggling to find the words for the mixed emotions, for this wonderful and wonderfully complex woman--an agitated grandmother for peace, lover of my ordained grandpa, but bitter towards the church, motherless at four, and orphaned at seven, left to raise her younger sister, her cousins, her children and grandchildren, devoted teacher to many more in Iowa, Papua New Guinea, and at Janet's House.

Friday night Oscar and I came home from the farm and spent our evening outdoors, building a fire, cooking and eating venison brats, weeding and eating from the garden.
"You be the baby kitty and I'll be the mama kitty," he says as the sun sets behind the trees.
And a little little later when I let out a sob, for the grandma I've lost, for the parents she lost when she was still so young, he turns to me in pink glow and asks with such care, "What's the matter baby kitty?"

Her last years have been hard, the past year especially, for her, for my mom.... Dementia takes away the person you know and leaves a shell, a whisper (or angry shouts) of who they once were.  I’ve wished so much there was another way.

You be the baby kitty and I’ll be the mama kitty.  

[this part needs more… how the roles shift, from mama to baby and back? does a troubled past, or a troubled present, make it harder or easier to love?  Maybe like Sherman Alexie, not having the typical motherly love as much (as his recent memoir is about) allows more love for strangers?]

She was not the kind of grandma to smother me in kisses, or snuggle my baby son.  But she was the kind of grandma that would wear a rainbow button on her jacket and tell everyone how much she loved her lesbian granddaughter.

If the grandma I knew was present today, she would have been nodding her head at Tina Fey on Weekend Update last Saturday. She would not have been discouraged in these times, but fired up! (Overwhelming so.)  Gripping arms in the library, the grocery store, the hardware store, slipping Alexie's Hymn into pockets, mailboxes, electric bills, and then sending me to the library to make a hundred copies more.

My grandma turned 95 today

“I don’t know what to do for her birthday.  It’s so hard to know what will be meaningful, and not overwhelming.”  My mom confessed to me over the weekend.  I made a plan to meet her at the nursing home in the morning, before I bring Oscar to daycare.  

We beat her there.  Walk back to Grandma’s room, but the door is shut and through the door I hear the voice of the aides helping to clean her and her bed.

We walk back to the front room, where my mom is pressing candles into a loaf of Coco’s pumpkin bread. When Grandma was still living at home, she would have us buy these for her by the dozen, to be stored in her freezer and eaten over a couple weeks.  

When we return to her room, my mom knocks and the aides are just finishing up.  Grandma is distressed, calling  “Janet! Don’t go!”  as my mom returns to us in the hall.

“I’m coming right back,” she tells her.

“It’s okay, Mom.” I say as she fumbles to light the candles.

“It’s okay, Ya-ya!” a little voice echoes. 

We walk in the room, singing happy birthday.  All relaxing a bit, as we focus on the warm light of the candles and Oscar’s eager face.  

“Will you help me blow them out?”  Grandma asks him and together they blow at the candles.  

She wants it cut a certain way.  Passes a few pieces to me.  And tells mom, she wants some, but not now.  Asks her to put it in the bottom drawer, which is full of her clothes and depends.  

I put my hand on her knee.  She turns to me.  “It’s so awful” she says, “when the shit comes pouring out and they are on the floor cleaning it.  And they get impatient with me.  Even the ones that like me.  Because they work long hours, I know.”  

A little while later:  “I want to recite a poem: A poem is a tree. But fools make schools, make fools like me.  But only God can make a tree.”

I move her table so I can give her a hug.  She holds on and exhales in my arms.  

Before we go she asks if we can help move her back to her bed.  Mom takes Oscar into the hall and I help Grandma walk to the bed. Lift her legs into the covers. Adjust her pillow.  Kiss her head.  

Trees 

By Joyce Kilmer, 1914

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Waiting, Like I Am

drawings by Kate Demorest


The line on the pregnancy test this morning is only faintly positive and in a way I’m glad it isn’t the same bold line that we celebrated with champagne seven months ago.


That night, grinning ear to ear, sugar plum babies dancing in our heads, Jen and I felt like the luckiest lesbians in the world to have gotten pregnant on our first attempt. “Guess what?” I sent in a text to Kate the next morning. My best friend from high school and Jen’s best friend from college, Kate was responsible for us getting together five years earlier and had been following our baby-acquiring progress ever since. A year ago, she was home from Colorado for a week to visit her Dad, and I had her read the string of facebook messages in which we had asked Michael to be our donor--

Us to Michael: “just saw your offer to doulo on the yoga mamas photo. would you ever consider being a donor/doulo? no pressure what so ever, just beginning to explore our options.”

Michael: “I would LOVE.. and be HONORED to throw my sperm in the pool.. and go along for that WHOLE ride.. REALLY.. put me on the top of that list.. I'm ready for the conversations to begin.”

Us: “yay! you've actually been at the top of the list for awhile.... just haven't had the right moment to ask... we're not quite ready... we want to be a little more settled, in our little house, on our own land... hopefully in a year? let's definitely get together some time and chat more.”

More recently, Kate had heard of our happy hour baby planning sails with Michael (“What do you get when you put two lesbians and a gay goat farmer in a sailboat together?”), how I was starting to eat better, drink less, and track my cycle, and the hand-off plan that Jen and Michael had worked out—meeting half-way in Cornucopia to deliver the goods and take a shot of whiskey together. Kate also knew it had been just a few weeks since Jen had raced home with the first syringe of warm spooge.

“Are you pregnant?!!” she texted back, and then when I had confirmed, “I'm so excited! I just told the whole ski patrol locker room!!!!!!!”

I imagined her happy-dancing around the room, making her co-workers grin with excitement, even though they had never met us. It’s the kind of news that’s just so fun to share, it’s hard to not tell the whole world. If I had one of those fancy phones, I may have posted a pic of that positive pregnancy test as my status, but I’m glad I don’t and I didn’t. I also don’t regret telling the people who we did tell, because they were there for us when things didn’t go as planned.


We were in Duluth when I started spotting. I was only seven weeks pregnant. I had just turned in my paperwork to get signed up for BadgerCare. I still had a month to pick a doctor and schedule an appointment, to listen for a heartbeat. When I first saw the drop of blood in the hotel toilet, I thought for sure it meant I was going to miscarry. We sought advice from some of our women friends and learned that a couple different people we knew had spotted during their pregnancies and it had turned out fine and we had some hope ours would too.

The next day, it was gray and sleeting as we drove around the cold city.

“We can just go home.” Jen offered.

“We are least going to eat sushi while we’re here.” I replied, with a half-smile.

At home, I started cramping and bleeding a lot more. In the morning, I drove down Star Route from our little house to the farm. The sunlight glittered off the snow-drenched trees. I hugged the curves of the road. I thought of children I had taken care of throughout my life—helping with the day care program my mom operated out of our house since I was five, and then falling back on babysitting-work throughout high school and college, and even in Chicago—always and increasingly knowing I wanted to have my own, but not sure when, how, or with who.

Jen was living on the west coast when we started to fall for each other. Facebook flirting turned to long emails turned to in-to-the-night phone calls, and within a couple months she had moved back to this place she had always wanted to call home more than seasonally, and to me. In one of the early emails, I had shared my life plan with her (“finish my thesis, work hard and live cheap, in a tent if need be, until I have enough money to buy land somewhere on the peninsula, travel, then around 2012, if not before, build a house; when that's done: baby”).

She wrote back immediately, “I’m in.”

While we didn’t follow the plan exactly, we came pretty close, and once we were together and settled in this place, it all came fairly easily. We found work to fill in the gaps of the seasonal work we already had. We lived cheap. We adventured together--canoeing in Canada, kayaking on the lake, hiking with Kate in Utah. We bought land, built our little house, and found someone who could help us make our baby-dreams a reality.

I knew that miscarriage was common. One in four pregnancies end in the first trimester. My mom had a miscarriage between Chris and me. A little thing the size of her thumb, buried under one of the apple trees lining our driveway. I knew the chances were good I would also experience one someday, but for this first part of my first pregnancy I reminded myself that 75% of pregnancies are just fine. Other than slightly sore and swelling breasts, I couldn’t see or feel the baby growing in me, but I knew they were there. I tracked their growth each week from poppy seed to kidney bean, hands and feet emerging, tadpole tail diminishing.  I loved walking around with (and sometimes sharing) this secret. I’m pregnant! Still young and gay and pregnant! In October, we’ll have a baby. I calculated our child’s graduating class, kept track of their classmates via pregnancy announcements on facebook. I looked out the window of our house at the mounds of snow left by the plow and imagined our kiddo carving forts in the banks with my wife. I imagined bringing our baby with me to the farm, coming up to the house for lunch, and finding them asleep on my dad/their grandpa’s chest, as he dozes in his leather recliner.

Driving down Star Route, it was this image that started the tears. When I had called my mom from Duluth, I was still hopeful, but now I could feel the blood trickling out onto the pad between my legs along with my imaginings of a round belly, a fall baby, a growing family….replaced with an absence, an emptiness, an ache.

When I walked in the door, my dad came over and gave me a big hug. With tears still close to the surface from my drive, his expression and touch quickly brought them back. I buried my head into his chest and sobbed as he tightened his hold on me. My mom and brothers came over and gave hugs too. Even though they were all there because of a previously scheduled farm meeting, I was glad to be able to share space with them. I excused myself to blow my nose, wash my face, and pour a cup of coffee, and then joined them in the living room, to discuss logistics of the upcoming farm season. A couple hours into the meeting, in the midst of a lengthy discussion on blueberry beer labels, the phone rang. My mom went into the kitchen to answer it and then called for me.

“Magdalen, it’s for you. It’s Aaron.”

“Irmiter?” I asked as I walked in the kitchen. He was the only Aaron I could think of, an ex of one of my friends and someone who I still enjoyed running into and chatting with, but I had no idea what he would be calling the farm about.

“He needs Kate's number," she said, then gently before passing me the phone, “Harry died.”

Harry—Kate’s dad and a good friend to both Jen and me. We were the closest thing Kate had to siblings and we had always known when this day came, we would be there to help. Even though Harry had his health problems, and in recent years had been organizing his life for a smooth departure, we had no indication that it would happen so soon. Just the other day, when the temps were up and the sun was out, we had said we need to stop by soon to drink a beer with him on his porch and stock up on coffee.

I remember forcing myself to breathe in and out so I could take the phone and talk to Aaron, searching through my emails for Kate's cell phone number, while Aaron told me about how Harry hadn't delivered an order of beans to the coffee shop on Friday, or responded to phone calls over the weekend, so he had driven out to his house to check on him and found him, half eaten peanut butter toast and the Thursday paper open on the kitchen table.

I texted: "kate. i have bad news. please call me at the farm as soon as you can. i love you so much."

When she called a little while later, I started crying. She was with friends on the way back from a ski trip. Although I was glad I was the one to tell her, I wished I could be there with her. The next few hours were spent helping to arrange details, calling Harry’s friends and employees to share the news and find someone to watch Harry’s dog Buckley, deliver coffee orders, and keep an eye on the house. Jen was guiding a dogsled trip that day. I left a message with her boss to give her the news when she got back and have her come to the farm. In my second or third phone conversation with Kate, she asked, "How are you? How is the baby?" and I told her I thought I had miscarried.

"Well, we'll have each other," she replied.


Jen and I drove to Minneapolis that evening and stayed with friends. They asked if we had any dinner requests and I told him my midwife friend said I needed to eat iron, so we arrived to a meal of steak with kale and prunes. That night I got up every few hours to sit on the toilet. Around 3am I passed the placenta and knew for sure it was a miscarriage, by that time I hadn't had much hope that it wouldn't be and I was glad to have the worst behind me. In just a few hours we would be heading to the airport to catch an early morning flight to Denver.

Before we left, we ate toast and eggs and tilted our coffee cups to Harry. We slept on the flight. Kate had a friend pick us up at the airport and we spent the rest of the day at her rented house in the mountains, helping her make plans for the memorial and the trip home, her Colorado friends stopping by through out the day with beer and food.

The next morning, Kate packed the majority of her stuff in the back of her truck and we were on the road by noon, Kate and I in the front, and Jen and Suvi, Kate’s year-old Australian Shepard, snuggled on the small bench seat behind us. We decided to drive north through the mountains to South Dakota for a more scenic and calm route home. It felt good to be together in the car. To laugh and cry, to talk or not talk about Harry, my miscarriage, the coffee business, life. We stayed at a Motel 6 and the next morning we ate breakfast at Wall Drug, took funny pictures, drove through the badlands. The sun was out and it was over 60 degrees, and for a little while we could pretend that we were just on spring break. Then it was east on I-90 for six and half hours, and then north on I-35 for four more.

It was 1am before we pulled up Nevers Road and turned into Harry's driveway. A bottle of scotch with four glasses and a basket of bread and food greeted us at the doorstep. Kate opened the door and walked in calling, "Hi Dad." She walked through the house turning on lights, picking up a framed photo of him and her as a baby and carrying it with her. "It feels good to be here" she said, "but I still feel like he is going to come in from roasting coffee any minute." We poured four shots of scotch and sat around the kitchen, listening, and chatting. Then we went up to bed leaving the fourth glass of whisky in front of the picture--a proud young father holding a joyful naked baby.

In the morning Kate’s mom Seri and others came over to help get the house ready for the memorial and Jen and I left to take some time for ourselves. Jen went out to the dogyard to check in and I went to the farm and ate my mom’s food. I sat in the living room with my laptop and wrote an email to my friends. The friends who had been following our baby progress, who sent us concerned messages when they heard of Harry’s passing on Facebook, but who hadn’t yet heard the whole story of the last few days.

“Tomorrow will be a good day,” I ended the email, already looking forward to sharing space with the people that would come out to celebrate Harry at his memorial. As I typed, I could hear my brothers filling the bed of the farm truck with split wood for the bonfire. “I love this place and this community. I am so glad we can call it home. I am glad that Kate will be here with us for the next few months, whether or not she decides to stay. I hope you all are well and look forward to the next time we can share a cup of coffee.” 

Shared joy is double joy. Shared sorrow is half sorrow. A framed embroidery of this adage hangs in my parent’s house. Just as I couldn’t help myself from sharing the news of my pregnancy with my close friends, I also felt the need in my grief to reach out to them and let them know, to divide the weight of it.

I am grateful that Harry's passing and my miscarriage coincided.  I don't need to know where their spirits slipped away to, but I like to believe they are traveling together--our little tadpole baby curled in Harry's weathered hand or peeking out of the front pocket of his bib overalls.  During this time I’ve grown closer to Jen, Kate, and others as we fill in the space of our losses with each other. I also value the stories of loss that have been shared with me or that I’ve come across in the novels I’ve read (Benediction by Kent Haruf, A Death in the Family by James Agee, and The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood). I started writing this morning because I wanted to remember and understand this moment, to share honestly, to strengthen my connection with family and friends, and to offer comfort where my story might overlap with others. I am happy to be pregnant again, and just like before, I do want to share the news with the world, but it feels out of context to not also share the rest.

Time stopped in March and then keep moving.  I helped Kate with the coffee business, she helped me haul sap at the farm, and Jen met us with old fashioneds and fish fry when we came home tired and drained. We had two snowstorms in April and one in May. We played a lot of Candy Crush and ate a lot of birthday cake. Jen put the dogsleds away and started getting the sailboats ready for the water. I pruned blueberries and planted the garden. In June, Jen and I went to Europe to attend two friends' weddings. We drank German beer and swam in the Mediterranean. I thought I might be ovulating the day we got back, so we tried inseminating. I got my period. We tried again. The wind was just right to sail Michael’s little boat wing on wing into the Corny harbor and I said I must be pregnant, but a few days later I got my period. So we tried again.


I see pictures of newborn babies on Facebook (yesterday Edwina’s son, today Jared’s daughter). I am so happy for them. I wish we could just have a baby already so they could grow up with the other babies being born, but I also know I have friends who right now might be pregnant counting the days until a pregnancy test can confirm what they hope, or waiting until they’re past their first trimester or the baby has been born to announce. Waiting, like I am, to make sure everything is okay before they get their hopes up again.