A Note on the Innocent Dead
My mother’s mother died almost exactly 25 years ago, in November 1998. Last week, my own mama and I sat and laughed, remembering my extraordinary grandmother. “She picked a good time to leave,” I suggested. The family – and the nation – were prospering in the fall of 1998. The stock market was booming, peace seemed to be breaking out all over, and our nation’s greatest obsession was whether the president had lied about an affair.
World War One broke out when my grandmother was four; when she was 19, the stock market crashed, and the Great Depression began. Peggy Moore Chickering left the world at 88, thirteen months before the end of the century, having witnessed an extraordinary narrative of progress. Imperfect progress, to be sure, but undeniable improvement, nevertheless. In 1994, she gave each of her grandchildren money to buy the personal computer of their choice. Peggy had seen a news report on the Internet, and she wanted to be sure that we all got “online” as quickly as possible. The world was getting better all the time, and she didn’t want us to miss a minute. Thanks to her generosity, I bought a Mac desktop, got my first modem, and went online with Earthlink the same month the 49ers last won a Super Bowl.
Things have changed since Peggy’s death in 1998, and very few of us think for the better. “She would have been very disappointed in many things,” mama conceded about her mother. It was easy to list several.
I married my third wife in May 2001. The grandfather she adored, her mother’s papa, died a few months later, on the afternoon of September 10 – about 18 hours before the first plane hit the Twin Towers. Over and over again in the days that followed, as we helped with funeral arrangements and stumbled through a transformed world, my then-wife repeated the same thing: “He left at just the right time. I am so grateful he didn’t live to see this.”
I like to think my grandmother can see me. I think my father, who died in 2006, can see me too. I was not raised to believe that was possible, and my mother – still a staunch atheist at 86 – does not believe it. I believe it less because of any instruction I received but because my own longings and fears force me to agree with Voltaire: Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer. “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
If my grandmother and father and all the other ancestors can see me and my children, then presumably they have witnessed September 11 and October 7 and all the other fresh horrors that have happened since they left this world. They have seen Donald Trump win an election, and they know of the Kardashians, Yemen, and the debate over transgender athletes. That’s quite a lot to lump together, but I’ve heard friends and loved ones say that they are glad that some adored forebear did not live long enough to see whatever one of those particular outrages most upsets the descendant who is still here. (Some of those same friends and loved ones do, unlike my mother, believe in an afterlife, so I am always curious about what they imagine the dead do and do not notice about our doings on earth.)
My children wish very much they had had a chance to know their grandfathers. Both their mother and I lost our daddies before we became parents. The kids ask for stories about “Grandpa Hubert” and “Abuelo Chuck,” and their mama and I oblige. I weep to think at how much my own father would have delighted in Heloise and David, and in the four other beautiful grandchildren who have come into this life since he departed it. I choose to believe that my father sees them, and I tell Heloise and David that he is watching over them, cheering them on, one of many in the cloud of adoring, approving, unfailingly devoted witnesses.
I don’t always believe it, but it is the prettiest thing to think, and so I think it. Il faudrait l’inventer.
“You need to live long enough to know my children,” my daughter says to me. “You’re going to break the cycle.” I tell her I watch my weight, go to the gym, and look both ways when crossing the street, partly for that very reason. I tell her that if anything does happen to me before that time, that I will be standing with the ancestors above, offering unconditional approval and love, and I will try and come to her in dreams. Quite rightly, my teenager does not find that especially comforting. Perhaps, someday, she will.
It is good to imagine the dead rooting us on. It is good, if contradictory to the previous sentence, to give thanks that they did not live to see particularly dreadful things. My father would have been appalled at Donald Trump. My father would have been devastated by my own very public, messy, and embarrassing fall from grace in 2013. I like to think that if he did see my collapse, wherever he is, he was slightly less horrified than he would have been if he were living. Perhaps the dead have the advantage of knowing in advance how the story ends, and that comforts them. It comforts me to believe it so.
While my maternal grandmother grew up in comfort, my third ex-wife’s grandfather – the one who died September 10, 2001 -- grew up in poverty. He was seven when his family left Oklahoma in the Dust Bowl exodus, eventually settling into an exceedingly marginal farming life in the northern San Joaquin Valley. As Grandpa Lane told the story, he did not use an indoor toilet until he was sixteen. Over and over, he said to his granddaughter, “I worked hard so your mom would never have to live the way I lived. There are some things I am proud you won’t ever have to know.”
Lane wouldn’t speak of the details of his upbringing, but it was evidently marked not only by deprivation but by violent abuse. He ran away from home as quickly as he could, joining the Army at 17. He saw more dreadful things of which he could not speak, first in Germany in 1944 and ’45, and then in Korea in the early 1950s. His granddaughter wanted Lane to do a memoir, but he refused. “Baby heart,” he’d say, using her nickname, “some stories best left untold. I saw it so you won’t have to.”
Just as we see hard and shocking things that we presume (or hope) the dead are spared, they saw and knew things they hoped very hard we would never experience.
In a strange way, both the living and the dead are eager to safeguard the innocence of the other. That’s one of the many things that love looks like, I suppose.