You may know that yesterday I was cleaning up around the house. I posted some cool pictures on social media of a few things I found. But there was one I didn't post, the one you see above.
(My middle name is Paul if you didn't know that.)
This is the last Christmas card Grandma signed for me. The only thing is, I never got it. She put the card in a dresser and forgot about it because she had dementia near the end and hid a lot of things throughout the house. It surprised me finding this. There were a few others, blank, probably meant for my brothers. This would have been 2021. She still had about a half a year to live, and she spent most of it gone. Look at the handwriting. Her cursive used to be sweeping and beautiful, but age had turned it into a tremulous thing.
But the thing that made me smile was that she was herself when she wrote this. Grandma was hard to live with near the end for a variety of reasons that I'm not going to go into here. When I think of her I think of her near the end, incoherent, screaming, nearly blind. Not my grandma, in other words. But reading this card brought back memories of how she was before. Even on her funeral card you can tell she's not all there. She just knew someone was taking a picture of her, so she tried to smile. This card, though, helped me remember her in better times. Kinder times.
One thing about the card made me tear up a little. That last word: ALWAYS. It's like she barely squeaked it out, like she'd been trying to hold herself together just long enough to finish writing this sentiment. Like maybe she thought this was her last chance to tell me she loved me.
A lot of people seek out some silly idea of closure. There's no such thing, unless you invent it yourself. In my mind things don't really end. They change into something else. Not even death is an end, only a transformation. When I die I'll be buried, and my body will slowly turn into worm food. A fisherman will eventually use those worms to catch fish. And the fisherman will eat his catch, and so I'll be welcomed into a human's digestive tract until he shits me out, and I will have transformed yet again. Closure doesn't help. Continuation does.
But now I'm not so sure, because there was a certain finality in finding this card and nearly weeping over it. A certain peace. It's like there was someone telling me a story at a subliminal level, and the story just ended.
I'm glad I found it. It has brought me comfort, and sometimes that's the best we can ask of the universe.
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