Do you know who you are?
I wondered this when Alli and I came to Denver. When you move as an adult, you start relationships with people who have only known you for a sliver of your life. It makes you stop and consider who you appear to be at that moment in time – and underneath, who you really are. People in Denver don’t think of me as a 10-year-old, glasses-wearing kid or a shaggy-haired teenager with a fondness for Aeropostale t-shirts. They think of me as 30-year-old Jon, married to Alli, living at Denver Seminary, looking like I do now.
So is that who I am? It’s part of me, at least.
But people are always changing.
We used to visit Grandpa in the nursing home.
This was after Grandma’s dementia had gotten bad. I remember one visit she started yelling at a nurse, saying something that didn’t make sense over and over until her voice wore out and she started to cry. Grandpa sat beside her, holding her hand and telling her it would be okay in soft words meant only for the two of them.
Afterward, we sat with Grandpa in his room. It was clean and smelled like chemicals, but you could tell he lived there because he had pressed a Post-It note onto every object: “Press the Guide button,” he had written on the remote. “Steve’s family,” he had scrawled below our picture. Little words to keep the world in order.
We didn’t have much to say, sitting with him. We tried to find some folder for him on his computer. We listened to an audiobook. Time was up. We hugged, stretched, moved toward the door. Grandpa gripped our hands and gave us a sad command:
“Don’t remember us like this.”
We could see the weight of the request in his eyes. We drove home.
He asked that of us again and again in his last few months.
I think I know what he meant.
He wanted us to know that he and Grandma were not just the dying people we visited in that nursing home. They weren’t just their failing, faded bodies. They were more. They had fallen in love, gotten married, built a house, started a family, run a shoe store, worked in a garden, baked raisin-filled cookies, lived a million other moments I’ll never know. To remember Grandma and Grandpa only in the sterile nursing home would be to dishonor the fullness of who they were. To fixate on the ragged end of their lives would be to make their lives sad and small.
But this is what I don’t think Grandpa realized: He was the dying person in the nursing home, too.
Shortly before my grandparents died, my brother and I played a concert with songs we’d written to process the slow loss. Our family came. It was one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done. It’s part of who I am.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I didn’t fully know what my grandparents meant to me until I watched them die. To fixate on their deaths would be to make their lives smaller. But to pretend the hard years never happened would be to do the same thing.
I want to remember my grandparents the way they were, all the way through.
Imagine a fine, brightly-colored thread.
The color changes across it in gradual hues like a rainbow. At one end the thread starts bright green, then it fades to baby blue, then deepens to dark navy, then purple, then silver, then it twists into orange. Do you think you can know the thread by snipping a section from it? Hold one bit and you would call it one color, but you’d only have part of the story. I think, to really know the thread, you would have to see its full length all at once.
But I also think that’s just the beginning.
Now imagine the thread is part of a tapestry. There are billions of threads, all woven together, back and forth, in and out, making an image that’s too big to put in a sentence, that stretches out into shadows and shades and twines together like a dance. The thread is part of a pattern that stretches past the edges of your eyesight.
We have these fixed images of ourselves, but we live in the constant wash of time, always changing hues. Do you think you can know a thread without seeing its full length? Do you think you can know a thread, really know it, without seeing the tapestry?
Do you know who you are?
