Small minds add a little levity to a solemn occasion
We’d spent a day out of cell reception, and I saw the missed calls as we were driving home. I rang my mother, and she shared the news. Nan had passed away.
Everything about Nanna was gentle – her hands, her voice. On the surface, her impact was gentle, too. We’d spent a lot of time with her when we were children, and she’d just let us be.
As an adult, I can see that her influence reached into many corners of our lives.
What a gift, to be so calm and grounded and quietly kind. What a gift she was to us.
She spent a lot of years patiently waiting for death, not because she was unwell but because she was tired and she was ready.
She was a devoted Baha´ ’ı´, and at 96 years old, Baha´ ’u’lla´ h finally welcomed her.
I waited until the following morning to tell my wee boys. I didn’t expect them to be devastated, because they’re young and thankfully inexperienced with the finality of death. Their great-grandmother didn’t play a big part in their lives, but they had met her many times and glanced every day at the photos on our fridge.
Emre, who is three, offered a little cuddle and then wandered off to play. Millan pondered in silence for a while, staring into the middle distance while he tried to process the news.
His first question, presented with a five-year-old’s earnest intensity, was: ‘‘Are her eyes shut and her tongue sticking out?’’
Clearly, at some point he has witnessed the death of a cartoon character.
The boys were dispatched to kindy so that I could concentrate on getting us to the funeral.
I cried down the phone to the sympathetic but stymied Air New Zealand employee when she checked the rules and confirmed that although grandchildren were eligible for discounted compassionate airfares, great-grandchildren were not, and so my dependents would cost close to $500 each for a one-way flight to Dunedin. We packed the car and started driving.
The funeral was two days later and, predictably, my children were small menaces.
Even a short, informal funeral like this was going to push them beyond their limited capacities to exercise good manners. The solemnity of the occasion distracted them for about 10 minutes before they slithered from their seats and on to the floor.
Millan at least had the grace to remain relatively quiet. His little brother rolled around on the altar and rapped on the windows. My sister tried to sneak around the lectern to grab him, and he ran away, shrieking with laughter.
As my mother was giving her beautiful, heartfelt eulogy, he cheerfully bellowed to me that we should chop up the floor with an axe.
It was shortly after that that I scooped him up and retired him to the family room, where he could roar at his toys without disrupting anyone’s grief.
Meanwhile, my father asked the gathering if anyone else wanted to say a few words, and Millan’s hand shot up. My aunts shared a grin, but I wasn’t game to let him loose at the lectern.
There was a slim chance that he would say something adorable and profound, but the odds were far greater that he would chat to his captive audience about Noddy’s Dazzle Dragon or reopen his negotiations to see Nan’s body.
It was a relief to learn afterwards that most people found the boys’ antics rather enchanting. Apparently, they had offered a little touch of life and some vaguely inappropriate light entertainment.
Nan had four children, so I’m sure she would have understood. She wasn’t a particularly easy woman to scandalise.
By the time we were gently guiding the coffin into the hearse, Emre was squirming with tiredness.
He asked hopefully if it was time to go back to Granmama and Papa’s house.
Not quite yet, I told him. We’re going to the cemetery to bury Nanna.
‘‘But,’’ he protested in outrage, ‘‘but . . . but our hands will get all dirty!’’ I assured him there’d be a spade. At the graveside, the children raced around like wildlings, enraptured by the soft grass and fresh air. I was left to nervously consider just how far people’s good humour would stretch if one of them fell into the open grave and squashed Nan’s woollen felted coffin.
I could almost assume that the whole experience of the funeral sailed right over the boys’ heads but for one small moment.
Poppa was carefully helped outside of the funeral home towards the hearse, and he sat stooped in his wheelchair, staring intently at the coffin as he murmured a shared lifetime of farewells. He looked terribly small and unbearably lost.
Millan observed him for a minute, and then tugged me down to kneeling so that he could whisper a message in my ear.
‘‘Tell your Poppa that his wife is in the sky.’’
At the graveside, the children raced around like wildlings, enraptured by the soft grass and fresh air.