Left Behind

My aunt Sue wore my grandma's dress to my brother's wedding in July. "I thought she'd want me to," she whispered to my dad as we waited for the wedding.

My aunt Kathleen brought the quilt---"The last Grandma pieced," she confided while we stood outside the temple after the ceremony.

I wore Grandma's shoes.

I wear them whenever I'm in the temple. I wore them again last night, tugged them on in the ten-minute pre-session frenzy wrought by my feeding the missionaries the moment we should have embarked for Cardston. To exacerbate my stress, I'd spent the thirty-five minute drive with Jared concocting Christmas. "Four jean quilts," I'd tried to convince him. "I've got scraps. Maybe Sheila could coach me." Short of stamping my forehead, "CRAZY," he shook his head. "It's not worth it," he moved; and I knew he meant my strain, not the project's expense. The last word as we dashed from the van to the temple was Jared's resolute, "It's just stuff. You can't take it with you."

No. But you can leave it behind.

Almost every Christmas, Grandma and Grandpa gave us books. Just books, but they were one way Grandma and Grandpa made thinkers, leaders, producers, entrepreneurs, and educators out of so many of their thirty-three grandchildren. Christmas after Christmas, those books instilled in us Grandma and Grandpa's value of great education. And they didn't just give books; they received and they read books, too---often several at a time.

After their death, they left their books behind. One of them came to me: Go Forward with Faith, Sheri Dew's biography of Gordon B. Hinckley. A Post-It marked one page quoting President Hinckley's philosophy on reading:

From the reading of 'good books' there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way. It is not enough to read newspapers. . . . But to become acquainted with real nobility as it walks the pages of history and science and literature is to strengthen character and develop life in its finer meanings. (72-73)

Beneath this assertion, which could have been Grandma's own, Grandma had underlined Robert Browning's aphorism: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp." She had scrawled her own version on the page-marking Post-It: "Reach further than before." And she left it behind for me.

Grandma gave books; but sometimes, for Christmas, she gave gifts she created herself. One year she cross-stitched mugs in intricate floral patterns for each of her grandchildren. Another year she cross-stitched Christmas tree ornaments: not simple-stitch initials, like she'd helped me construct as a ten-year-old, but vintage circuitous Santa scenes, shaded and nuanced, every tiny square within the ornament frame etched in floss. Just stuff. We can't take it with us. But whenever I touch it, she touches me back, and she teaches me with the excellence of her work.

Then there were the quilts---not for Christmas, but for weddings. She let us choose any pattern. When I was engaged, she pulled out her books. But one was missing. I knew because I'd picked my pattern from it when I was twelve: the double wedding ring, in pastel pink and forest green. I was bold enough to ask for it, and Grandma produced it . . . with slight hesitation. Only after she'd finished the masterpiece did a cousin confess Grandma's resolution, sworn years before my marriage: "Never again," she'd vowed, after the serpentine production of an older cousin's double wedding ring. Why she reneged for me, I couldn't guess.

As a child, I felt sure she disliked me. She loved me, of course; but somewhere between Rule 23: Clean-Socks-On-The-White-Plush-Carpet and Rule 439: No-Unaccompanied-Children-In-The-Formal-Living-And-Dining-Rooms, I formed the vague impression of myself and my kind as a nuisance. I was a twenty-four-year-old mother of two, tip-toeing into the mortuary where Grandma awaited Grandpa's viewing, when I first knew beyond a doubt that Grandma loved me. I threw one arm around her---the one not holding my baby. "Oh, Sheralee. Bless your heart," Grandma wept. We cried together. That's when I knew.

What I didn't know---what I never knew until Grandma's funeral---was that Grandma lived most of her life in chronic pain. Doubtless her silent suffering must have amplified my childhood misdemeanours. She nursed her health with work, her personal panacea, and she expected us to follow suit. As an elementary principal or a senior Swedish missionary, a vegetable gardener, a pianist, or an Idaho Falls Temple worker, she lived by the maxim, "Work will win when wishy-washy wishing won't." Her work baked bread, froze  jam, bottled peaches, sewed dresses, crocheted blankets, molded lives. Her work built readers, writers, teachers, artists, musicians, moms, and dads. Even in her final years, after Grandpa left her widowed, dying in his sleep two nights after Christmas 2005, Grandma worked. "I still have quilts to make," she resolved as we left Grandpa's funeral. Just stuff, those quilts, and all that work. She didn't take it with her. But she left it behind.

My uncle Conrad said her death was peaceful, like passing through the temple's veil. He was consoling me as I wept over Grandma's casket in 2009. "Roseanne was there," he reassured me---she was my Uncle Jim's wife, long deceased---"and Grandpa, and Grandma's parents." He didn't say it, but I imagined Uncle Conrad's son Joseph there, too. "This is good for Grandma," he attested.

I didn't get to say good-bye. I'd phoned her one week earlier, to wish her a happy birthday. She was too sick to talk on the phone. I left a message, but I forgot to say, "I love you." I never even wrote her a thank-you card for the double wedding ring quilt.

She left her pristine living room. After her funeral, the white plush carpet still squished beneath my clean-stockinged feet. She left her books and her sewing machine and her cross-stitch. She left her bread pans and her freezer jam recipe. She left unfinished quilt tops for my devoted aunts to complete, and she left Aunt Sue her temple dress. She took with her God's promise that binds us beyond death; she'll always be my grandma, and my cousins', and our children's.

The rest she left behind.

To me, she left a turkey roaster, an amethyst necklace, a couple of jewelry pins, and books. She left me a queen-size double wedding ring quilt and a lifetime to live my gratitude. She left me her shoes, and she left me behind to continue the work she commenced in them.