My grandmother passed tonight

[WilliamPitt]

She went very peacefully.

In an nice quirk of fate, I helped to ensure that her priest was by her side. I had to drive my aunt's car from the hospital to the house - one of those logistics things - and answered the phone in her house when it rang, thinking it was my aunt.

Instead, it was the Monsignior, who had catered to the spiritual life of my very Catholic grandparents for decades, and who had sent my grandfather off when his time came four years ago. I told him what was happening, and where my grandmother was in the hospital, and bid him goodnight.

Apparently, the Monsignior dropped everything, jumped into his car, and raced to the hospital like a bat out of heaven to be at my grandmother's side. He made it there a few minutes before she passed, and gave her the benediction. She was not awake, but I believe she would have been well pleased to know this, and I know it was a comfort to my uncle, who was at his mother's side until the end.

I cannot begin to thank all of you for your kind and comforting words in the other thread. I'll tell you a quick story about my grandmother, so you can have an idea of who you were praying for or sending good thoughts to. In the early 60s, she and my grandfather were in a plane crash. It was a small plane that was eventually taken off the flight line because of a design flaw that caused other crashes.

The plane flipped over on takeoff and caught fire. One note to those who don't see the wisdom of wearing the seatbelt on the plane: My grandmother's most vivid memory of the crash was watching the one guy who wasn't belted down go bouncing around the cabin like a tennis ball during the crash. Moral: Wear the seat belt.

Anyway, she woke up upside down in her seat, held there by the belt. My grandfather was knocked cold next to her, likewise belted in and upside down. She unhooked herself, dropped to the floor, and looked to her husband. She saw that if she unbelted him, he would fall on her and they would both be trapped, so she walked through the smoke to a hole in the fuselage, and went out to get help.

My grandfather woke up a moment later, dazed and disoriented. He unbelted himself, and followed her red dress through the fire and smoke to safety. That's how it was with them. They went through the fire together - the depression, the war, raising a family, always together for 61 years. Now they are together again, and that makes me very happy.

I was never, ever, ever any good at writing poetry, but I wrote this for my grandmother after her husband passed, when we thought she was intending to follow him immediately. She didn't, until today.

Flyfisher

My grandmother was a fly-fisher before arthritis
twisted her hands and knees and back
into shapes only fit for sitting and watching television.

Have you ever seen fly-fishing? It is older than Jesus
and done the same way today as it was yesterday
and 100 and 1,000 and 5,000 years ago.

Old cane pole with a ball of thick twine cast out
on smooth water, floating like a tasty bug,
like ringing the dinner bell for trout or bass.

The fly’s the thing: colored string and bits of cloth
tied around a barbed hook to look like an insect.
The best ones, the real ones, are made by hand.

My grandmother made her own flies before arthritis
stole the deft talent of her fingers. I found a leather
case full of her hand-made flies not long ago.

They had eyes, and wings, and legs, and looked
for all the world like bugs until you got careless
and hooked yourself accidentally in the thumb.

Tying the fly is the hardest trick to master.
The string must be wound and wound round
the shaft of the hook, secure against bass bites.

It takes time, and patience, and care, and love.
In that leather satchel I found were flies that
surely took her hours and days and weeks to craft.

My grandmother was a fly-fisher before arthritis
and a bronchial infection and cracked ribs from
a fall and dehydration and kidney trouble and stroke

and the death of her husband of 61 years
last December put her into the hospital bed
I saw her in last night, clad in white like a cloud.

She called me Michael, which is not my name,
but that was fine with me. I held her wrinkled,
spotted hand in mine and marveled at her fingers.

Those fingers had tied my heart to hers, surely and deftly
over years, with patience and love, so cleanly and
completely that I never saw the hook coming into me.

My grandmother was a fly-fisher until she just got
too old to stand in the lake and cast the line. I know
she misses the thrill of a strike, the silence of wind

on water. She lies now in a hospital bed in Brighton,
unsure of where she is or why, fidgety and ill, lonely
for the company of her husband, whom she hooked first.

The bright colored twine she used to wrap us all in
her love has begun to loosen, breath by breath,
layer by layer, wrap by wrap by wrap. She hooked

us all and we hooked her, a family of fly-fishers
entwined in history. But like all human fish she will
soon slip the hook and disappear into dark water.

My grandmother was a fly-fisher, a catcher of souls
in her own quiet, stubborn, loving, bemused Irish way.
I do not know of one fish that slipped through her nets.