SermonStudio

Claire Clyburn

I went to visit my parents one Sunday afternoon, following our Easter worship service. They had a collection of old college yearbooks on the kitchen table and I sat down to have a look. They were from the 1920s and were yearbooks from my grandparents' college years. I recognized my grandmother's picture in The Oak Leaves, Meredith College's annual. I tried to imagine her as a young woman, nineteen years old, with a flapper haircut and stylish dresses. Her smile was demure, even as a young woman. For the first time, I could see a little bit of my mother in her.

I found my grandfather's yearbooks -- The Howler from Wake Forest University. It only took a minute to find his portrait, class of 1926. I couldn't believe my eyes -- here was a handsome young man with a half-smile, round Harry Potter glasses, light brown hair, fit and trim, with his whole life ahead of him. There was an air of expectancy about him. I put those two pictures side by side, my grandfather's and my grandmother's, and wondered what had drawn them together a few years later when they were both teaching at the Morehead School for the Blind.

When my grandfather was in his sixties, he retired from teaching at UNC-Wilmington and spent the rest of his days on the sound. He made and mended nets during the day, fished in the early morning hours, according to the tide, built houses or did other carpentry work as time allowed. Every afternoon he took a nap on the swing couch on his front porch. Though there was no air conditioning in the house, the constant breezes coming from the water had a natural cooling effect, and Granddaddy fell asleep curled up on his side with a gentle breeze wafting over him. When I think of him now, that is how I usually picture him -- curled up in a fetal position on that couch, like a tiger taking his noonday rest. As we grew, he took pride in teaching us the old ways, and he wanted to see our muscles, especially after spending a day working with him in the shop, or on the boat. My brothers would make a fist with pride, and my cousin, Laura, and I also would flex our biceps, not knowing that it wasn't ladylike. He would feel our growing muscles and we would beg him to do the same. At sixty and seventy years of age, he would flex his bicep and a muscle the size and hardness of a major league baseball would pop up without difficulty.

He lived to be 89, and worked every day but Sunday all of his life. He neither smoked nor drank alcohol, ate the freshest foods he could find, what he caught from the sound and what he got from the garden; he drank mostly water, huge glasses on the table at every meal, and a cup of coffee in the morning. He loved coconut cake, but otherwise ate few sweets, even on holidays.

Grandma taught first grade for over thirty years before she retired. Once she retired, her time was taken up caring for a granddaughter who lived nearby. I never saw her walk anywhere; she scurried and hurried like a mouse from the stove to the sink to the porch to the laundry to the bathroom to the living room. When she needed Granddaddy she went to the front door and yelled, "Adrian!" "Hoo!" he would call back. She worked sunup 'til sundown as well and couldn't stand the idea that you might do something for her, so that she could sit down and rest. He went to bed no later than 9 p.m., no matter where he was. She stayed up to read, her one passion.

I remember one of the last times I saw them before Granddaddy's failing health landed him in the hospital for the last three days of his long life. It was over New Year's, near his birthday, and my brother and I went to see them for the day. We brought a meal with us so that neither of them would feel obliged to cook. The year before we had taken a Christmas tree to decorate so that Grandmama would have one in her home. I have a photo of the two of them, married over fifty years, sitting on their couch, and the couch nearly swallowing them whole. I remember distinctly how long it took them to stand up from a sitting position, how many times he would start up with his arms, like they were propellers giving him extra momentum, until he could halfway stand in a bent-over position. Two or three more pumps with his arms and he would be upright, his breath punctuated with snorts and grunts as his legs limbered up and he tried to walk.

I put these images together -- this twenty-year-old young man in fighting trim, the sixty-year-old man whose bicep would have given Arnold Schwarzenegger a fright, and this 89-year-old man whose body was beginning to fail him. Old age, says my dad, isn't for sissies.

He was lying on his side in a fetal position when I saw him last. If it weren't for the fact that we were in a hospital, it could have been another sunny day on the front porch, him taking a nap under the shade and breeze. He was in pain as his kidneys began to shut down and didn't have much energy for words. "I love you, Granddaddy." "Hoo."

Seeing him dead, that bicep no longer flexed, those bright studious eyes forever closed, the half-smile drawn and mercilessly still, I gave thanks for my Christian faith, which teaches me to believe in a resurrection of the body.

I often wonder how I will recognize my grandfather when I see him again. Will it be by his bicep? His half-smile? Will he be curled up on a couch where the breeze comes off the sound? Will I call him and hear him answer, "Hoo!"?