in memoriam

He was buried exactly the way he would have wanted to be buried. Small, intimate, completely natural and organic and lacking any kind of artifice. He was buried the way he lived.

My first memory of my grandfather is of him giving me the moon. A good astronomer, he brought his telescope with him on a visit to Alabama. One night we set it up in our yard and he let us look at the sky. We were at Thirty-three Adams Street at the time, so I couldn’t have been more than six or seven, but I feel like I was closer to four or five. I still remember the surprise and awe that moved through me so tangibly when I really saw the moon for the first time. The dark side of the moon, so long assumed by my child’s perspective not to exist at all, was dimly visible on the left and the texture and shading on the right still stands out in my memory it its full glowing glory. I remember it being enormous.

This moment of discovery was pure magic, and that experience of real life magic is as important as the curiosity about the world it lit up - the first of so many things he has bestowed upon me.

What I admire so much about my grandfather is how fully he lived his life. He died just a few days shy of ninety-four and a half, but had enough spirit and life to fill another complete lifetime. Exactly a month before he died, I stopped by for a few minutes with my brother, Ross. We were passing through Eugene and I wanted to see him once more. On his hospital bed in the living room, he was still as engaged as ever, talking with as much energy as possible (considerably slowed down compared to my visit in April with my other brother, Dagob). He told us how his body was changing drastically and he could either read or write a letter or eat, just not all three at once. Rests were required between each activity, but he still had so many things he wanted to do. It was heartbreaking to see his body sloughing off in large flakes and know the spirit inside had so much more he wanted to do.

I am well aware that every life has to end at some time, as well as the fact that we can’t recreate the memories Death takes with him. I think I mourn the loss of his stories as much as his vivacious presence in his storytelling. Alfred Mikesell was a magnificent storyteller. He had an amazing memory for all the details of countless family and personal epics as well as the short vignettes. And he came so alive in the telling, his presence and engagement in life so tangible in his voice and movements. I don’t ever remember a time when I was too young to be captivated by his tales, even the more lengthy or scientific. They were full of tangents and factoids and organic details that added a cadence and flow that can’t be replicated. He stretched beyond the boundaries of his physical form and invited those listening to expand along with him. His stories weren’t self-glorifying or narcissistic, but humble yet lush. He would talk on and on, one story leading into the next not out of disregard or lack of curiosity for those around him, but simply out of enthusiasm for sharing and reliving. As an artist whose lifework is dedicated to the exploration and understanding of self within the tapestry of family history, I have always acknowledged Grandpa as the keeper of our family’s history.

On Wednesday the 25th of June, I had some extra time in the morning to get ready for work, so I checked my email and saw that Grandpa had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. He was no longer eating or drinking and he was barely conscious any more. Aunt Kathy had changed her flight to leave in morning instead of waiting until Friday and the necessity of that change hit me in full force: he wasn’t going to last the week.

I had a very dense car ride to work with Eden and we started by talking a lot about my previous night’s dinner with another friend. This other friend had confessed that she could tell me things despite not having really seen me in years, that she hadn’t told anyone else before besides her husband. I thought of how I tend to have that effect on people, this ability to enter a close and intimate space, particularly with people I see infrequently. It’s the beautiful/unique/true part of me that, as all these most pure parts of my Self do, occasionally crosses the line to destructive/compensatory/too close. I suddenly realized that I open spaces in myself and others and that it is the common theme among all my passions. I want to create artwork that opens spaces. But even when I am not making artwork, in the way I interact and relate to people and the world around me, I am still succeeding and living this thing that is wholly and completely my Self.

We paused in silence for a moment, and I internally speculated how this is realization is tied to my experience of loss. I have a stronger than normal resistance to experiencing loss, and intuitively I sensed they are intimately intertwined. I told Eden about the email and I had my first moment of acknowledging the grief of my grandfather’s passing.

Somewhere a dam opened in me and my well-placed defenses of selective stoicism and undying optimism fell before the onslaught.

I find it somehow right that in the same conversation that I could acknowledge the cost of my grandfather’s death, I could also acknowledge the success that I have had so far living my life truly. A sense of surety and certainty was found in that car ride that I won’t fail in living up to my Grandfather’s life of connecting to people and living out one’s passions. I haven’t been able to fully make the connection between this underlying theme in my life and my experience of loss, but I know I’m on the right path for understanding and living both.

When I got to work later that morning, my sister hadn’t seen the email yet. She was so upset after reading it that we went on a walk to Lake Sammamish. This was right around nine o’clock in the morning and the sun and sky and day were all blooming gorgeously. We went out on a sandbar and watched a bald eagle fly over. We rested in our stories of him and we rested in quiet. It was a lovely walk. We came back to work and settled in for a few more hours before I got the next email announcing that Grandpa had passed away at 9am, right about the time we started our walk.

My whole body went numb reading these words: Mike passed about a half hour ago. I walked over to Bimi’s desk and just stood there, unable to actually say any words to correct her misconception that I was there for a lunch break. After a sentence or two, she registered the look on my face and without me having to speak, knew exactly what had happened. In a few half spoken sentences we agreed to meet in my car.

The hour we spent sitting out in the parking lot was...perfect seems like the wrong word to use, but it’s the only one I can conjure. We sobbed. We were silent. I gripped the steering wheel and held my arm out to the heat of the day. Eden brought us a whole roll of toilet paper. My parents called and we talked for a while to my mom. My favorite part was sharing with her the last few cards we had sent to him. My Mom had sent a three-panel card of a sheep running up a hill at night, standing at the top of the hill looking up at the stars, then trotting back down again with an empty sky behind him and all the stars in his wool. Bimi told mom about the card she had just put in the mail that morning. It depicted a woodpecker with a gleeful expression on its face wielding a power tool. We laughed as he would have and it felt so right. Clean. Clear. My grandfather would have greatly appreciated these cards and I can hear his great bellow of laughter starting high and getting lower on the scale for each subsequent full-bellied “Ha!” At some point, Grandma Marjorie interrupted the call and we switched over to hear her give us the news herself and invite us to the small funeral on Saturday. She said Grandpa had enjoyed the cards and postcards he had received regularly from us these past months. She said it more than once. It was so hard to keep it together on the phone knowing what she had just lost and watching her reach out to us and even remembering to thank us for our letters just a mere three hours later. And yet, it was fitting somehow that she was present in this initial hour of grief.

In his death, I am experiencing a close death for the first time in my life. While Grandma Mary was significant, she was still on the peripheral of my own life and I felt a detachment in that distance. It was the death of my mother’s mother and I mourned for the idea and my mother’s loss more than the specifics of a person, whole and complete, in my emotional psyche. Living close to Grandpa and sharing more time and space together, particularly in my adult life, has added a depth and richness that I have not experienced in loss before. He is not only someone who I loved and admired, but someone who is a symbol for family, memory, and living one’s passions, all things that are central to my being.

The funeral itself was perfect. In a culture where death is such a formal, overdone affair, my Grandfather asked for none of the artifice or ceremony. He built his casket years ago out of pine. Simple. Humble. Biodegradable. He didn’t want his body to be embalmed because he wanted to decompose quickly and nourish the trees he had loved so fully throughout his life. He didn’t want the funerary makeup or his best suit or anything of that nature. Simple and humble, much like himself.

Our family did everything. Grandma and Aunt Marny changed his clothes (under the gentle supervision of the funeral home staff) and Grandma carefully wrapped him in a tapestry she had bought on their travels decades ago. Together the two of them with the help of the two workers lifted his body into the casket before being gently tucked in by Grandma and taken away. Grandpa had picked his burial plot out on the family tree farm and a precise and elegant hole he would have marveled at was dug for him. The family came out in casual clothing that could get dirty and wore much like what we all would be wearing for a stroll through the forest. The last to arrive was Grandma Marjorie who was gently led by Uncle Tom. She was wearing a black T-shirt with constellations on it and the words along the bottom saying “Heavenly Bodies.” It seemed appropriate at the burial of an astronomer. She stopped along the way to pick a few orange lilies growing along the path and joined the rest of us patiently waiting.

The moment of deciding who would carry the coffin to the grave was something that stands out in my mind. Any heavy lifting is assumed to be in the realm of men, but several of my aunts quickly stepped forward with a firm desire to be apart of the group carrying him. I held back not wanting to take the place that one of his children might desire to have, but came forward to assist in lowering his casket carefully into the grave. I stood at the foot next to Aunt Marny and across from Uncle John and Aunt Kathy, Aunt Rebecca and Uncle Jerry lowered his head. I could hardly see straight for tears. I had brought a white gardenia to put on the casket and it stood out regally next to Grandma’s two wild orange lilies. After he was lowered into the grave, Grandma opened up the space for a Quaker service.

We stood together in silence and listened to the forest and birds and wind and words of those gathered as they felt moved to speak about Grandpa. Marny opened with a poem sent by Uncle Steve. Uncle John offered “parting is my saddest pleasure” and one by one many spoke of the gifts and anecdotes of Grandpa Mike. Barely able to speak, I offered up my first memory of Grandpa and the moon. Aunt Kathy identified the bird that was chirping the perfect requiem. She also introduced Joe, who had worked with Grandpa on the tree farm for almost forty years. Joe spoke of walking all of the 160 acres of the forest with Grandpa. He had a clear voice and a face that was twitching with grief for the man he had for almost two of my lifetimes. Uncle Tom spoke about a walk they had gone fairly recently and joked that Grandpa nearly outpaced him. Dagob told the story about the last walk he took with him this spring where Grandpa had spoken about death, and his curiosity that was mingled with just a touch of fear. So many beautiful words were spoken, I wish I had captured them all when I had the ability to remember them all. There was a lot of silence too, but a silence filled with the wind in the trees and the birds. Aunt Rebecca pointed out the view that he would have for eternity and we all looked up at the canopy of trees above us for a few moments.

In the end we all gathered round in a circle for a final Quaker prayer while Aunt Rebecca was egged on by her sister to sing the Grandfather Clock song. Everyone was still marveling at the fact that the Grandfather clock he owned stopped the day before he died.

My Grandfather's clock was too large for the shelf,
So it stood ninety years on the floor.
It was taller by half than the old man himself,
Though it weighed not a pennyweight more.

It was bought on the morn of the day he was born,
It was always his treasure and pride,
And it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.

In watching its pendulum swing to and fro,
Many hours he spent as a boy.
And in childhood and manhood the clock seemed to know,
And it shared both his sorrow and joy.

My Grandfather said that of those he could hire,
Not a servant so faithful he found.
It wasted no time and it had one desire,
At the end of the week to be wound.

And it stayed in its place, not a frown upon its face,
And it's hands never hung by its side,
And it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.

A few people joined in the song and we chuckled softly into a silence holding hands in our internal prayers.

We had four or five shovels and people took turns filling the hole above the coffin. The gravedigger had informed the Aunts that we had to pack the dirt down tightly, particularly around the edges of the coffin. The first time someone stood on the dirt above the coffin, I had a moment of dismay at the lack of respect, but then realized that Grandpa would have of course approved of a gravesite properly constructed. I’m also certain if he had been there in body, he probably would have had a few questions or speculations on the best way to go about packing down the dirt and the possible consequences or advantages to each different method.

The group effort of the burial felt Right in a way I never anticipated. Almost everyone took turns and there was something shared of the grief in this joint task. I was wearing sandals and observed the damp, cool dirt between my toes and watched the redness stain my feet and felt so connected to my Grandfather and my family in this simple yet almost antiquated act of practicality and tradition. The image in my minds eye of my Grandfather inside the wooden box, eyes closed, lovingly wrapped in his tapestry felt so much apart of those of us moving about above. The neighbors brought a basket full of flower petals that were scattered over the finished mound for its crowning touch and we said goodbye and left, Grandma’s hand tenderly being held by Uncle Tom.

The next morning those of us still in Eugene came back to the forest for an early morning walk to Jonathan. My understanding is that he’s the oldest tree in the forest, but that might be incorrect. He certainly is the only tree in 160 acres to have a name, and he has been lovingly watched over and spared from the selective harvesting by both my grandparents. The walk up was lovely. We started early and hiked up from the little house on the property, pausing to listen to birdsong and identify the singer. I was walking with Aunt Kathy, and were walking a bit behind the others so when we rounded the corner and saw the fallen tree they were standing beneath, it still took me a few moments to comprehend the enormity before me: Jonathan had fallen.

Along with the stopping of the grandfather clock, it seems like these pillar objects that were tantamount to my Grandfather both acknowledged his passing before the rest of us. We can’t place Jonathan’s exact date of death, but definitely in the past year since Grandma, Bimi and I had gone out to see him the spring a year before. There had been worry of him rotting and it appears that one of the many windstorms we have had recently finished him off. We walked up the considerable length of his trunk, marveling at this event and found pieces of him to carry with us. As we turned to leave, Bimi and I both spotted a beautiful piece of trunk that was too large to carry home in our already packed car, but part way back to the cars, a better idea occurred to us. We ran back and the two of us carried this beautiful piece of wood all the way back down and placed it at the head of Grandpa’s grave. A fitting headstone.

Now that my grandfather is gone, we are left with his remains, but not the remains of a body as he had already given that to the trees. No, remains in a sense of all the things, memories, objects, papers, that he left. Objects from a life and souvenirs for our memories. His smallish room is jam packed with books and old bills, projects and old scales he collected – several of which I dusted off and polished in April (and on that same visit, my brother and I discovered an old Weston print that comes with it’s own story, of course). Like all good “to do” list sort of people, myself included, evidence of multiple projects patiently lounge around on any free surface. Books span the perimeter of three of the four walls, treated with a casually jumbled but marked reverence.

In the days shortly after his death my aunts worked their way through his study. Among the things they filling his room is a set of journals he had kept throughout his life. One of my aunts flipped through several and found bits and pieces of his story that fill in a different perspective and reality of my grandfather. Perhaps the most shocking was that this optimistic, chipper person contemplated suicide in his early years of his marriage to my Grandmother Mary (who he later divorced). They also found a photograph of him in some book or stack of papers that depicts him with a hat brim covering his face and shading his eyes. He isn’t looking at the camera, but away and his usual Cheshire Cat smile is missing.

We take these things and extract new meanings because it is all we have left. These objects allude to parts of his humanity we didn’t get to see but will become just as much a part of our understanding of his life as the pieces we cherish with picture frames, heirlooms and hand written letters. It’s not that we see an entirely different person here, just less edited, or less sculpted and we see new facets emerge. A new perspective; a different understanding. There doesn’t have to be a conflict or reconciliation between the two experiences of the same man. They are one and the same and I find myself approaching these new facets with a loving curiosity that I learned from the man himself. One of the most precious things I own is the post card collection he gave me. I look forward to reading the postcards written to him and the stories they imply. I look forward to the reconstruction inherent in my new discoveries. In this way, not only does he continue to live, but also continues to grow in my experience of him.

About a month ago, I reread Keturah and Lord Death and felt a closeness to death that I had never believed imaginable. The story, which unfolds so elegantly, reveals this deeply intertwined relationship between life and death and for the first time in my life, I could feel the lack of separation between the two. One passage in particular stood out in this second reading. I still remember the blazing moment of realization when I read:

"Tell me what it is like to die," Keturah replied.
"You experience something similar every day," Death said softly. "It is as familiar to you as bread and butter."
"Yes," Keturah said. "It is like every night when I fall asleep."
"No. It is like every morning when you wake up."

As I muse on it further, I have realized not only is my Grandfather waking up to a new day, but those of us left behind are too. We are waking up to life without our Alfred Mikesell and Grandpa Mike. We are waking up to a shifting, sieving interpretation of our memories of him and his remains. And every day we wake up with the impact of his death on our hearts and minds and Death's offerings of a bitter-sweetness and tenor to our lives that we couldn’t live without.