Edith’s Song

“I like that song,” my grandma told my cousin a few weeks ago as he strummed the guitar. “What is it?”

“It’s your song, grandma,” he said.

She sat across the room from him, simultaneously resting her body and laboring to breathe even with the increased help from her oxygen machine. Side effects of the lung cancer medication made her tired, but she looked ready for battle with her new hairstyle — a short, white buzz appropriate for a bona fide badass.

“That’s sweet. But what song is it?” she asked again.

My Grandma Edith didn’t exactly live a life of ease, but as long as I’ve known her she seemed to have a deep desire to stay positive in the face of adversity. Recently, whenever I would ask her how she was feeling, she’d reply, “pretty good. I’m doing better today than I was yesterday,” even though the opposite was truer. I imagine she developed a lot of tools for dealing with emotionally impossible things over the years; some way of believing that a better shape of life could be sculpted with just a little more time.

The missionary, flea market organizer turned con man preacher she married and divorced twice when she was young left his mark on her and their children until he died of AIDS, quite publicly in 1988. Not to speak ill of the dead, but her youngest son picked up where his dad had left off — for years trying without success to break her spirit, day in and day out, even after her diagnosis. She had bought a small house where they could both live, and he lived in poor health until he died in August of 2021, a few months after she had moved out. She saw the best in her son. But it wasn’t that she wanted him to live with her forever, she just shouldered his heaviness so that the rest of the family could live without him. It wasn’t fair to her, she was just speaking her love language.

My grandma loved to tell stories. When I was growing up, she lived with our family in the lower level of our home. I remember countless instances of her coming up the stairs just to borrow a stick of butter and then staying for as long as it took to unpack the day. She loved to regale us with anecdotes from her work at the Oregon Workers’ Comp office, and then mix in a present tense quote anytime someone says something funny. I don’t know why I remember that.

This past Christmas, my Grandma Edith and I got to catch up for a while, and she let me know that she was “going downhill.” She was one who could easily hide, so it was telling that she decided to come out and say the truth. A week ago, she and her doctor decided to stop cancer treatment and call in a hospice nurse. The sun was kind this past weekend while she lay in bed, drinking coffee out of a syringe, and on Sunday afternoon we talked on the phone for the last time, though she couldn’t say much. I told her I hoped she could get some rest, and she rallied a few times to be sure I heard her say “I hope you know I love you.” Her nerves calmed down a bit on Sunday night when my cousin came in to play some guitar for her, like he often did. A few hours later, with her family close, she went peacefully in her sleep, just the way she wanted to, in a brand-new nightgown her beloved family had brought her.

It’s your song, grandma. You can tell everybody it is. How wonderful life was when you were in the world.

Edith Shane Hayden (1939–2022)