As I drove my wife to the hospital, the baby wouldn’t stop kicking. Still a week from his grand entrance, he was showing his impatience by inflicting pain on his mother. But this wasn’t the day we would finally say hello to my son. It was the one where we would say goodbye to my grandmother. She was 92, a fact everyone who knew her always forgot. So vibrant and funny, she made us all assume she would be around forever. But she was dying. And yet, as Carlie and I pulled in, we were both still holding out for a miracle.
And why shouldn’t we? Nonny approached life with an appetite that made her seem unstoppable. The wife of a doctor and mom of five, she became one of the first nurse practitioners in the country. She never fully retired, always jumping at the chance to give flu shots. At 92, she was winning golf and bridge tournaments and still taking on new challenges. One night a few years ago, Nonny joined my stand-up comedian wife, Carlie, onstage in Los Angeles and improvised. She loved it so much that a year later she went back up and did a five-minute solo set of her own. All that vitality was deeply rooted in her faith. She would leave Mass each week, fully recharged, exclaiming to everyone around her, “Don’t you feel wonderful? Don’t you just want to kick up your legs?”
And even now, a week after the doctors found the cancer, she was still telling us she felt wonderful. The day before we had come for lunch at her home and she even insisted on dessert. She ate every last bite of blueberry pie. The nurse practitioner in her knew that once you stop eating, there is no turning back. Afterward, I handed her a letter about what she meant to me. She read it, smiled and changed the subject to her upcoming bridge tournament that week. She had no interest in goodbyes. There was her first great-grandson to meet. She would be taking him to the beach this summer, and nothing was going to stop her.
But her body had other ideas. In the middle of the night, she woke up struggling to breathe. In the ambulance, the paramedics gave her oxygen. At the hospital, they put her on a machine that breathed for her before they learned she had elected a “do not resuscitate” order (usually called a DNR.) The doctor sat with her in the emergency room and told her what she already knew: Her organs were shutting down. Nonny listened politely, then asked, “How do I cancel the DNR?” She was not done living. Despite being one of the most faith-filled people I had ever known, she was trying to bend God’s will to her own.
As Carlie and I walked into intensive care, I asked God to spare Nonny. I could not imagine a world where my son would not know her. Then a memory surfaced of Nonny helping me learn the Lord’s Prayer when I was small. It was an inconvenient memory. The line “thy will be done” was not the prayer we wanted for our current needs. To ask God’s will to be done was to agree to lose her. But I forced myself to say it anyway and asked God, if this was indeed the day she would leave this earth, to help her surrender to it.
I looked at Carlie, who was in pain from those constant baby kicks but trying to ignore it. “Don’t worry, I’m fine,” she said, grabbing my hand.
As we approached the room, my father was outside waiting for us. “She’s decided….” He couldn’t get the words out. “She’s decided she’s not going to fight anymore.” Somewhere in the hour since she spoke to the doctor and asked to cancel the DNR, something had changed in Nonny. My dad left to find out when the priest would arrive. It was time for her anointing.
When we entered, she had a massive oxygen mask on. We approached her tentatively. Now that she had accepted it was the end, would she feel bitter? Scared? She smiled through the mask and said with total peace, “It’s the right thing.” She took my hand, the way she had since I was a kid, leading me into the ocean on Cape Cod, making me laugh by tucking seaweed under her armpit like it was hair.
I honestly don’t remember what I said. Some version of how much I love her and will miss her. What I do remember is how sorry Nonny was that she would never meet her first great-grandson. Carlie reassured Nonny that we knew she would always look out for our child, and Nonny smiled. “Only the best luck for him,” she said.
Nonny then gave Carlie birthing advice. It struck me how normal the conversation was becoming, as if Nonny were simply going away on a trip and would have to miss the birth.
My parents pulled me aside. The priest had not shown up. Call after call went unanswered. Of all the grandchildren, I had embraced Nonny’s Catholic faith the most. I had worked at a Jesuit ministry, had several priest friends, was the self-appointed papal nuncio to my family. So solving the missing-priest problem fell to me. Her organs would be shutting down and she would die soon, but I had nothing. “Maybe you could say a prayer?” my mom managed. “Her pain is getting worse. They want to start the morphine to keep her comfortable.” With her medical background, my grandmother knew she wouldn’t be present in the same way once they started the morphine.
Lord, Nonny stood beside me at every sacrament, I reflected. How can she be denied this last one? She deserves so much more than an impromptu prayer from me. Then an image came: Nonny singing loudly at Mass. I realized if she could joyfully sing off-key for God every Sunday, certainly I could offer a clunky prayer for her.
So, with the family gathered close, I started to pray, ending with the Our Father. And for the last time, Nonny prayed aloud with me. “Thy will be done,” we said together. I wasn’t a priest, I didn’t have oils, but if two or three are gathered in his name, he is there. And we were far more than two or three: a full circle of her kids and grandkids had come to the hospital by now and gathered around the woman who taught us to pray. A sacrament, as I remember Michael Himes saying when I was at Boston College, is anything that brings grace to your attention. Grace was already in that room. Our prayer was just how we finally saw it.
After we finished, Nonny told the nurse she was ready for the morphine in the steady voice of someone who had spent a career giving exactly these instructions. But this time she was the patient.
What happened next was nothing like I expected. She was more energetic than she had been all week, chatting like it was a summer evening on her Cape Cod deck with a glass of chardonnay. It took on an Oscar speech vibe as she thanked countless people. Some, I thought, did not deserve her thanks: people who had been unkind, others who had seemingly used her. But I caught myself, the religious guy in full judgment-mode determining who was worthy and who was not. She may have spent the past week resisting God’s will, but now she had not only accepted it, she was channeling it.
After a while, she got quieter. We adjusted her blanket and gave her some chocolate ice cream. My sister Alicia touched up her lipstick. She rested her head back and my mom signaled me. As I started the Hail Mary, Nonny suddenly shot up: “Oh, I forgot to mention Linda from Bridge. She’s such a good player. She’s just starting out, but please tell her to keep at it!” We promised we would.
Her work done, Nonny reclined again, but kept her eyes open. She said to herself, “Okay…okay,” like she was mustering the strength for something really big. Not in a scary way. More like excitement. The same “Okay…okay” she would say when we were about to run into the ocean together. “Okay…okay,” she continued, a bit softer. Little by little her eyes began to close. But this woman who so relished life kept one eye open just a sliver, holding the final image of us all smiling at her through tears.
The minutes after can be compared only to a pregnant woman in labor. Our grandmother was laboring not toward birth but toward death. Toward those who had gone before her. Toward God. But instead of the contractions getting closer and closer together, her breaths got further and further apart until the nurse said quietly, “Her heart just stopped beating.”
In the parking lot, I asked Carlie how she had managed two hours in such pain from the baby’s kicking. She hadn’t felt any, she said. The entire time in the room, the baby had stopped kicking. As Nonny drifted away, our son had been reverently still.
Just as my grandmother had set out for home, my son was about to arrive in the world. I cried, knowing she would never hold him in her arms, but those tears gave way to something I can only call consolation. I wondered if my grandmother might be the one to greet my son as he came into the world, expert nurse that she is, and guide him through to this side. I was filled with gratitude for all that she gave me. All that she was still giving me. Maybe, in showing me how she died, she had also been teaching me something about how to be a father.
When Julian was born a week later, he had a tiny birthmark on his forehead. My sister Kelsey looked at it and said, “I think that’s Nonny’s kiss.” I held Julian, looked into his eyes, and heard myself say, “Okay…okay,” mustering the strength for something really big.
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