Dead on Approval

A really personal piece on death and the way my family doesn't approve of me, but I wish they did.

Nana and her father in his backyard in the small town in Illinois she was from

Death, of myself and others, is the single thing that terrifies me most in this world. It’s the single subject I’ve written about that has caused me the most personal controversy, more than religion or polyamory or sex or any political take. I think perhaps it comes off as if I’m callous, when the truth is the exact opposite. Every person even slightly close to me who has died, and some even not, has continued to haunt me years later. I think about them, and their families, a lot. But none, perhaps, more than my maternal grandmother.

She consumes my thoughts, my opinions, and sometimes even my dreams. My maternal grandmother (Nana) passed away in April 2011, shortly after Easter. There’s nothing particularly shocking about the passing of a grandparent; almost all of us go through it. Grandparents are often the first serious brushes with death and mortality that many of us experience, leaving a lasting mark on our souls, either great or small. The unfortunate reality of death is that we often don’t realize how much people have impacted us until they are gone, and of course, by then it’s too late. I just didn’t realize how much someone could still haunt you over a decade later, especially if thanks to severe medical concerns, you’re kinda glad they’re dead. 

My paternal grandfather died when I was barely three years old, leaving my paternal grandmother to remarry and start her own successful accounting business with her new husband. Both of them were quiet, reserved, and standoffish, forever busy, and disinclined to conversations that were about anything other than work or occasionally, cynical family gossip. My maternal grandfather (Grandbob) worked two jobs, by choice and not necessity: as an esteemed science professor at our family alma mater, Lee University which I’ve written about before, during the day, and as a lab assistant at the hospital at night. He also had a Master of Divinity, and occasionally gave guest sermons at Church of God churches throughout the south, though fewer of them as he got older. He wanted to stay busy and his life was defined by some manner of Protestant work ethic that nobody was enforcing.

Even when he was home, he was often tending to some task on his ill-run 18-acre “farm” in the kudzu-wild southeast Tennessee countryside. Gardens needed to be weeded, lawns needed to be mowed, fences needed to be mended, compost piles needed to be shifted, and fires for trash needed to be started, since trash services didn’t come out that far. It wasn’t really a farm, though. With rare exceptions, there were almost never animals or crops being grown -- occasionally he’d keep a pig for a holiday meal, a cow for a neighbor, and for a while kept two horses for my sister. Mostly, it was just untamed land, with a pond he’d built himself, full of miniature forests, empty pastures, and muddy creeks that ran through the property. 

Luckily for me, we lived on their property, just down the gravel road from them. Just a gentle sloping hill, an easy walk away, even for a kid. My grandparents gave my parents an acre of their land when I was small, and they had a house built, and then I spent the bulk of my childhood living right next door to them. We didn’t have cable, because it was too far out, so I missed all the Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network references my friends made at school. Instead, I spent my days running barefoot through the mud, getting snagged on thorns, digging up worms, catching crawdads, and picking cattails and wild daffodils from a meadow.

Nana was there for all of it. My parents both worked as teachers, my mother also kept a meticulous house on top of it, and my dad mowed lawns in the summer to make up for lack of income. While Grandbob had spent his life chronically over-employed, Nana had been a wife and mother while juggling lifelong health problems, so she never held employment in the typical sense of the word. Instead, she played organ dutifully at church for three services a week, accompanied Grandbob on his summer mission trips, did chores, made meals, gardened, made social calls, and was part of multiple church groups that filled her days with more events than you would think.

Most pleasantly, she was able to play with us and be hands-on with us in ways that my own parents were unable or unwilling to do. My sister and I spent the night there often, usually on a weekend, but more often during the summer. She would both sing us to sleep and sing us to wake, with themed songs for the night and for the morning. Then, she would serve us an elaborate breakfast, always with fine china, but of course, not her finest -- she had quite an extraordinary collection of that. At our own house we were relegated to plastic kids’ dining wares except for dinner, sometimes. 

One of her favorite foods to make for us were soft-boiled eggs served in the German style, in an egg cup, which she’d learned about in the ‘70s when she’d lived there for over a year. With that, she would serve us something else, perhaps toast that had plenty of real butter and homemade strawberry freezer jam. Sometimes she made fluffy pancakes that neither my mother nor myself could recreate. Sometimes she made oatmeal topped with cream, butter, and lots of brown sugar, which I long for to this day when I consume oatmeal full of berries, seeds, and a splash of plain unsweetened almond milk as a healthy morning meal. 

After breakfast, she would take us “exploring.” We would start by running through the fields singing “The hillllls are alliiiive with the sound of muuuuusic!” all the way to the pond, which my mother (probably correctly) refused to let us swim in. Then we laid on the ground and looked at the clouds and said what they looked like, and then she made us tell her what we were grateful to God for. She’d let us wander through the creeks, tried to show us how to perfectly skip rocks in a skill she had mastered but I never could, and finally walked us to an abandoned feeding trough in the field where she’d sing an old Irish tune as we got inside of it and danced as she sang: “Oh, the days of the kerry dancing…” The spirit behind those vivid memories is “gone, alas, like our youth too soon.” 

In those moments, everything in the Earth spun around her, even me, dizzy to the point of no return. I didn’t want those adventures to end. 

More music would accompany her wherever she went. She played us showtunes, hymns, classic piano, and kids’ songs on her piano. I would sing them later to my friends, and they would have never heard them before. She sang us wild songs during road trips, on which she often invited my sister and cousins and I, or even just me, to see relatives in Illinois, Michigan, Florida, and Virginia. Even though she was never formally employed, she received a bachelor’s degree in music, organ emphasis, a decade or so before I was born. The wonder of her personal anthology revealed a life well-lived in which she had truly been able to focus on things that gave her joy. The artifacts from her many journeys abroad filled the house like a museum. Her personal library of classic literature, religious and philosophical books, and newspaper comic compilations amazed me too. 

She would often host dinners for locally important people and groups, serving up food stylishly and with the most beautiful plating she could manage. It stressed Grandbob out to have her agree to do so many things, but he’d smile along in silence, pray over the food, and tell everyone how glad he was that they were there anyway.  Afterward, she’d perform something for them on the piano, and if she was lucky, they’d sing, play, or read something out loud themselves, too. The creativity that surrounded her never ceased.

---

Behind all the magic, the music, the books, her travel and her proper fusion of Midwest (where she was from originally) and Southern (where she spent her married years) cuisine, she had dealt with lifelong health problems. In the ‘60s, she was told she had double kidney failure, and that she would likely die without seeing her children graduate high school. Determined, she moved to Richmond for a summer to receive a then-experimental kidney transplant, which was successful -- for about 15 years. In the ‘80s, that kidney failed too, and she got another kidney transplant. This time, however, she contracted hepatitis C from a blood transfusion, which later gave her cirrhosis of the liver despite the fact that she was a lifelong teetotaler. 

By early 2000, her third kidney was failing as well, and thanks to the advanced stage of her cirrhosis combined with her age and previous kidney transplant failures, she was no longer a candidate for another transplant. The “adventuring” had to stop. The medications she took to survive began to wear away at her body -- she developed skin tags, Cushing’s syndrome, and worst of all, her cartilage began to wear away in her joints, and soon her mobility was severely limited. She lost about five inches off of her height in the last decade of her life. But the sicker she got, the more stubborn she got. She refused to believe she was sick, continuing to go to multiple church groups, movies and plays at whim, spending time with friends, and still playing the organ at church, which was Wednesdays, Sunday mornings, Sunday nights, rehearsals, and special occasions too. 

Not only was she physically ill, but like every person, she had quite a few flaws, and not just the secretly admirable ones like stubbornness. She was often downright cruel to Grandbob, while also being completely codependent on him as she got sicker. After a while, I noticed their relationship was colder than, say, my parents’ relationship. They had some issues, the details of which aren’t mine to share, but regardless she and Grandbob had struggled with their marriage since the ‘70s. And it was for those struggles, not spur-of-the-moment missionary work, that they’d spent a year in Germany on a religious sabbatical. They wouldn’t have dared to get divorced as pillars of their Pentecostal community, but she never forgave him for whatever had occurred, even 30 years later when he was starting to forget how to drive a car. I learned she’d been particularly severe to my mother, too, desperately wanting a feminized, delicate daughter proficient in music, while my tough, no-nonsense mom couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. 

Nana was also demanding and pushy when she didn’t get her way. She guilted you into coming to see her, no matter how busy you were. A true matriarch in an ever-shrinking 5’4”, 110 lb. frame, she often intimidated people into doing things for her and adhering to her whims. Her views on appearance were strict: no extreme clothing, no unnatural hair colors, no tattoos, no piercings other than ears, and of course, there was nothing worse than getting fat -- which made my life difficult, having been overweight for the entirety of it. Her ability to gossip was fierce and legendary, and we could often hear her gleefully report “prayer requests” to her friends for hours on the phone, involving intimate details of other people’s lives we probably shouldn’t have known. 

When they finally had to put Nana back on dialysis, she insisted on driving herself there for every single session, even though they recommend someone else drive you there and back. Afterward, when she would be dizzy and out of it, she would drive herself to Starbucks for a treat -- a white chocolate mocha with extra whipped cream -- every time. She even had a few minor car accidents in her minivan, which I inherited after her death, full of dents and scratches but otherwise fine. I still drive that car.

In April 2011, after my wedding in 2008 and the birth of my first child in 2010, Nana died after a short infection that took her swiftly. Being hospitalized, and dying, was the only thing that stood in the way of her daily schedule and life plans. Nobody would admit it, but her death was a relief: the stress of watching someone being slowly consumed by the failings of their body on multiple levels is more emotionally exhausting than the passing itself, and we knew my Alzheimer’s-ridden grandfather was soon going to be unable to take care of her. It wasn’t then that I felt the magnitude of the loss, but years later, when I realized I couldn’t shake her.

My family was of a dramatically conservative, charismatic culture where opinions were screamed out as fact, and the most subtle differences of opinion in theology or philosophy or politics were hotly debated. Only later did I realize most families don’t debate arminianism versus calvinism at the dinner table. Everyone was fiercely Republican, taking pride in their pro-life, pro-Biblical stances, centering God and trusting in Him to care for everyone, assuming the government would merely get in the way of whatever divine plan He held.

The Pentecostal spirit of Biblical womanhood and family drilled into me from an early age, I married at 20 and had two children by age 25. When she died, I was living out Nana’s dream for me: working only a little bit on the side, happily married to another Christian man whose family she knew personally, attending a Church of God church, and having babies young. I don’t know if there’s a traditional heaven, or if the dead can see into the world of the living or not, but I wonder what she would think if she saw me now. 

In the years since Nana died, I’ve moved away from my hometown. I now live in Richmond, where she received her first kidney transplant, another curious coincidence that haunts me. Not only did I fall away from Republican politics, but I fell into far-left politics — a communist, which you already know if you already regularly interact with me. Despite daily exercise and a moderate diet, I’m not thin, and I never will be. I have multiple tattoos, including a highly visible chestpiece. I attend a church of Christian denomination notorious for having the first LGBT clergy, and has most recently had a seminar for its clergy on how to better serve its non-monogamous laypeople. I curse a lot, despite promising when she died that I would try to stop. 

And perhaps what would be most heartbreaking of all to her is this, the thing you all know about me: I now live with my husband, my boyfriend, and my two children. I’ve been polyamorous since 2015. First, the idea was to explore my sexuality and curiosity after abandoning such a strict evangelical culture, but later it became clear that my definitions of love and family had changed altogether, and that I was in love with two people, at least -- my husband felt the same way about other women as well. I’ve always had multiple crushes, multiple people I was falling in love with. It’s not just a sex thing. In fact, I think most people would be surprised — but as they all tell me repeatedly, my sex life isn’t any of your business.

Nana wept when one of her grandchildren had been discovered having sex in high school. If she found premarital sex among teenagers so devastating, how would she feel knowing that I have the kind of love life that is taboo even among other progressive Christians? Would she feel grateful that I at least kept my faith, or would she consider it false if it didn’t align with her views of scripture and theology? Would she meet my other partner, as my parents have, and begrudgingly adapt to the reality of having a polyamorous family member? Would she worry about my children? Would she even still talk to me? I have no idea. 

Grandbob fell into deep Alzheimer’s and mercifully died in 2020 at a surreal funeral in the middle of a pandemic, where my spouse was the only pallbearer wearing a mask and several of the church leaders present came down with COVID-19 weeks later after going viral for the way they ignored government recommendations on reducing virus spread. Several of their members died. It was a tragedy, and my family was lucky to have not been affected by these anti-science views when all we wanted to do was say goodbye to Grandbob; ironically, a professor of science. His beloved property was sold to people I care about very much, and my family is glad to be rid of its burden, even though the memories are so intense as to make the loss very bittersweet.

My other grandparents have no social media, no smart phones, and barely communicate with me, much less travel, so I don’t see them enough to share details of my personal life with them. Nana, I know, would have been the most upset.

Yet for our stark ideological and lifestyle differences, I find myself becoming more like her every day. I make my kids watch musicals and listen to old-fashioned music and play the keyboard. I read them Bible stories and sing them Bible songs. I bake things from scratch with real ingredients, championing traditional authenticity at all costs. I buy china and serve meals, looking for each and every opportunity to host a dinner party. I crave adventures and travel, and when I can afford it, I go overseas, and when I can’t, I’m content to find new locations within driving distance and forage in my own backyard. I’m more like her than maybe any of her other grandchildren. And yet, so wildly different at the same time.

I shiver a bit when shows like The Crown and Great British Bake-Off come on, knowing how much she would absolutely adore watching them with me. I feel my interests and spirit morphing into her interests and spirit as I settle into my 30s, and I yearn desperately for her approval, which I cannot get since she’s dead and would not get even if she was alive. Even if I gain my family’s acceptance, I will never gain their approval, and I want it desperately. Ironically, I cared very little about her approval when she was alive, albeit, I never had any reason to doubt I wouldn’t have it. Now that she’s been dead for over a decade, I’m obsessed with it. 

The Japanese people who practice Shintoism believe that there is little difference between life and death. In fact, when someone dies, their kami (or spiritual energy) is released and recycled. And spirits of the dead go to the realm of the afterlife, a neutral place that is not based on reward or punishment. The spirits can easily be called back to the living with prayers, proper customs, and during specific festivals, and are thought to be able to protect their living relatives. That thought gives the living comfort, because they feel as if their ancestors are always with them, influencing their actions from afar. If that is true it would terrify me, personally. 

I don’t want Nana to know what I’m doing. I promise you, I’m not ashamed of being polyamorous. I’m as open about it as I can possibly be. I answer deep, intimate questions about my personal life that would never be asked of monogamous people. Obviously. I love my Christianity, and I love my partners. My life isn’t much different from yours -- we have chore charts, we meal plan, we go to church, we go on walks, we game together, we fight about money, we squeal over pets, we talk about books. We worry about the news and talk to our families about innocuous things over text. We pray before meals and fret over busy schedules and try to raise our kids to be kind.

But for some reason, I remain fixated on the juxtaposition of how happy I am finally living as myself, versus how much she would hate me exactly the way I am now. She represents the approval I’ll never have from the good Christians I never totally fit in with. I may deride their far-too-rigid beliefs, their literalist interpretations, but more than anything, I wish that they could see me and love me as I really am, and all the complexities of my life and why I now believe the things I do.

Nana and Grandbob at their farm, attempting a take on American Gothic

---

Would she hate me? Would she send me long letters and emails written in her perfect left-handed cursive telling me to turn from sin and look to the Lord, or would she simply never talk to me again? If we meet in the afterlife, if there is one, perhaps God will be unconcerned with such things, and the perfect “peace that passes all understanding” would encompass us, now unconcerned with these earthly issues, just sitting in love and glory.

But my wildest fantasy, in fact, would be that she would embrace me with open arms on this Earth, now. I picture her healthy, running with me and my children under the mulberry tree near my house, singing them “Swingin’ on a Star” and then coming back to my house for a perfectly set three-course meal with my family -- my WHOLE family -- eaten on fancy china arranged perfectly, smiling at all of us, then praying over our meal. That would be heaven.