September 23, 2021
My grandfather passed away recently. He was a few weeks shy of his 97th birthday.
It’s been many years since I’ve lost a grandparent, so this grandfather was the first member of my family to pass away after I’d left the Church and stopped believing in heaven.
My other grandfather passed away when I was twelve years old and a young, earnest Christian. That led to some complicated emotions in my younger self:
- Was he saved and was he in heaven?
- Had I done enough to point him to Jesus so he could be in heaven—even as a twelve-year-old?
- He was still a good person even if he wasn’t saved, but was that enough for him to get into heaven?
It’s a lot of complicated and unnecessary thought processes for a young twelve-year-old boy who was facing the death of a family member for the first time.
Not only did I struggle with those thoughts, I then wondered if, assuming my grandfather was in heaven, he was looking down at me and watching me at all times. The people at his funeral sure said so. “Although gone, he’s still present with all of you, looking down from heaven.”
Was he watching me when I sinned? Could he read my thoughts? Was he shaking his head and disappointed now that he could see a 24-hour version of me rather than the well-behaved version he saw when he was alive? At the time, it was a lot to ponder.
So in the present day, when my grandfather passed away, I was in a completely different frame of mind. I was aware that he’d simply be… gone.
I was okay with my grandfather’s death because he was okay with his own death. He’d told me on multiple occasions when I visited him in the nursing home that he was ready to “move on.” He had a completely sound mind when he told me this. The last three or four years of his life left him unable to stand or really take care of himself, and he didn’t like it.
On the day before my grandfather passed, when he suddenly “crashed” and took a turn for the worse, I was in the room with him at the nursing home, along with my mom and dad. My grandfather didn’t know we were there. Hospice nurses were in and out, monitoring his vitals and observing. And waiting. My grandfather had long ago designated himself as DNR (Do Not Resuscitate).
Sharon, one of the hospice nurses, impressed me immensely. She was calm and competent. I could tell she was very experienced as an end-of-life nurse and had accumulated a lot of experience over the years. She knew exactly how to be present with us during that time, letting us speak while she listened. Not rushing anything, even though she clearly had many other patients.
She asked what my grandfather was like in his younger years, and we shared his story with her. When he was young and World War II broke out, he was eager to join the fight. However, since he was so intelligent, they wanted him to assist the war effort by working with RADAR instead. They administered him an exam which he purposely flunked. His superiors knew exactly what he was up to, so they made him retake the test. He purposely failed it again. At that point, they had no choice but to let him join the navy. They deployed him to Guam.
He married my grandmother soon after the war was over, had three children, and went on to have a long career as a rocket scientist. Some of his favorite hobbies were watching football and collecting, studying, and identifying rocks and gemstones.
After we shared all of this with Nurse Sharon, I’ll never forget how she turned to my grandfather and said, “It’s an honor to serve such an impressive man such as yourself.” She spoke as if she knew he could still hear her even in his unconscious state.
After that, Sharon turned to my family and me and I could tell she was about to begin a small speech of encouragement, something I’m sure she does with the families of her other patients. I cringed a bit. I thought we were about to hear a bunch of Christian stuff about an eternity in heaven—things I no longer believed in. But no. I was wrong. She said something along these lines:
“You know… the latest science is starting to uncover that transitioning from this life isn’t the end. That we are indeed more than just physical beings and that there’s some part of us that continues on after death.”
It was a breath of fresh air. Deaths and funerals are always so laced with Christian rhetoric and imagery even if the deceased individual never believed for a single second in their entire life. To hear Sharon draw her words of encouragement from somewhere outside of organized religion was very encouraging to me.
I realize that a lot of you reading this will disagree with Sharon and hold the opinion that there is no soul and that when we die, we’re truly gone forever. That’s fine. Right now I’m torn between that and what Sharon implied. In recent years I’ve begun reading similar literature as Sharon (another reason I was so surprised to hear it) and have been making space for that possibility—that we are more than merely physical. But that’s an article for another time.
Regardless of whether my grandfather is somewhere else beyond or nowhere at all, it doesn’t really matter right now. What matters is that he lived a good long life, was happy, and was ready for the end when it came.
I love you, Pop Pop. I feel very lucky and honored to be your grandson.