Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Grandmother’s passing leaves hole in his heart

Scott Dickensheets

Tuesday, April 21, 1998 | 9:07 a.m.

THIS MOMENT throbs in my chest like a second heart. This moment lodges in my throat. My mother is on the phone from Colorado to tell me that my grandmother has died of cancer.

Erma Paulson, my grandmother, was a special woman and something of a force in my life. Partly because she helped raise me when I was a pup (my newly divorced mother and I lived with her for a time), we had a special connection. It wasn't necessarily that we were alike. She was a Republican and credited my every wrong decision to me being a damned Democrat. A former math and science teacher, she was into numbers -- which she loved for their clean, unchanging logic -- while I was into words, which I love for their mischievous slipperiness. But on the important issues (life, morality, Colorado) we were in sync. So great was my respect for her that, when I was in school, my parents threatened to tell her whenever my grades slid. To avoid her disappointment, I always brought them right back up.

It seems callous now, but I don't know how old grandma was. Mid-70s, I'm sure. Age seemed so beside the point. She was admirably active, raising hell for years in Delta County politics and on the planning commission, always trying to play a role in her city. She was tough from decades of farm work, although that didn't stack up well against as many years of cigarettes. (When X-rays first found the spot on her lung, it didn't occur to me that she wouldn't beat it.)

Visiting Colorado, my family and I had seen her just a week before she died. In intermittent pain, minus much of her hair and trailing an oxygen hose, grandma still seemed to be toughing it out, as if cancer had just dinged her up a bit. She claimed to dislike being fussed over, although, secretly, she did. "Your mother just loves being able to boss me around," she told me with a wheezy laugh.

But of course the verdict was in by then, rendered in hospital tests and the doctors' sad certainty. I think everyone tried to keep the true diagnosis from grandma, but if she didn't know the timetable, she understood the time frame. "I've lived a good life," she told my wife, summing up.

The disease came on fast at the end, like bad weather, a cellular tornado causing irreparable damage. Nearly every day brought a shortened prognosis: "Six months to a year" quickly became a few months at best, which quickly became one month at the outside, which finally became "we don't think she'll make it through the weekend."

She didn't, and now my mother is on the phone, and grief, pain and fear converge in a lump in my throat and a spot of infinite density in my chest. Because I have an exaggerated tendency to hover above times like this and examine them from a distance, a retina trying to detach from its aching heart, I have plenty of questions and no answers, except for a handful of things I know for sure:

That I'm wearing jeans to her memorial, because she always insisted on her right to do things her own damn way and I try to, as well.

That I haven't wept yet and probably won't, that not being my way; that the grief, pain and fear of this moment are being processed below ground and stored in a deep chamber, like nuclear waste, in sealed casks that won't leak for 10,000 years.

That my sadness is mitigated by seeing my mother relieved of her burden of anguish.

That people are wrong to assume the little details of life aren't important at times like this; that times like this, in fact, throw the true importance of little details into greater relief, since what is life but an accumulation of them?

That people are also wrong when they say I shouldn't remember her the way she was toward the end; that I believe we should take more from this moment than warm nostalgia; that if we're meant to take anything from this moment, it's a greater investment in life, and that you can only do that by understanding how much you stand to lose; that to do that you must remember the oxygen tubes and the pain as well as the laughter and family stories; that, as a farm woman, familiar with the cycles of life and death, grandma would understand that.

That nonetheless my chief memory of her will always be behind the wheel of her car, on a drive we took more than a decade ago. She drove my wife and I around the area where she'd farmed for decades before her husband, too, died of cancer. On that drive, she knew every story about every family that lived in every house -- that's where old Fuzzy Taylor lived, and where his wife drowned herself in the cistern after first carefully removing her wig. That she could tell you about every hand-built stone fence and every grove of trees ; that I always wanted to re-create that drive with a tape recorder in hand; that I always figured there'd be time.

That now, I see what that moment means to this one, which is, finally, a vision of "a good life" as an accumulation of the small details of a lifetime spent intimately connected to a place and its people. That I wish I'd have told her all this; that I always figured there'd be time.

And lastly, that if she really is in a better place -- if, indeed, there is a better place than Colorado, of which I remain unconvinced -- she's already on the planning commission, and can't wait to tell me about every stone and every tree.