on transfiguration (for nanny)

The sun is shining and my six-year-old body lurches and lunges with that particular exuberant excitement of playing on the school playground on a day when school is not in session. We’ll make it summertime, if just to remind us that yes, somewhere in time, summer has existed and just maybe will exist again, though it could have been spring break perhaps, or maybe just a Saturday. My child self has recently become obsessed with monkey bars, so much so that for my sixth birthday, my mother rented the Magic Tumble Bus, a little-kid-party-bus that came to your house fully equipped with all sorts of gymnastic-like activities inside it, including (you guessed it), monkey bars on the ceiling of the bus.

On this particular summer day, I take off running to the school playground, my toddler sister Abigail waddling behind me, hand in hand with our Nanny. Nanny was our mother’s grandmother, our great-grandmother, a force of nature—a hurricane that would protect those she loved with her life, and, somehow, at the same time that gentle breeze that smells like honeysuckle and tells you that the end is far away and you needn’t worry about a thing.

I reach the playground and scramble up the steps, anxious to show my Nanny and Abigail what cool tricks I’d learned in kindergarten, skipping the actual monkey bars and heading over to what is meant to be a lateral ladder that connects the two separate towers in the play structure. The rungs of this said ladder are curved, and also raked, so they start high on one end and get progressively lower. Beginning on the high end, I prepare myself for my feat of daring. I’m going to do what I’ve done so many times: grasp the top bar firmly, swing down under it, and monkey bar my way down the slope.

However, I’ve never been the coordinated type. Most of my childhood stories involve me falling off of things, running into mailboxes, or falling off my scooter with various injurious results such as getting run over by the neighborhood boys on their bikes, and another time, fracturing my wrist. On this particular day at the school playground, with every ounce of verve in my body, I swing down with such force and exuberance that I misjudge where my body is in space (typical), and smack my face, hard, into the metal bar.

Blood fills my mouth instantly and I drop to the ground. My already loose front tooth is now hanging by a thread, and I am wailing loud enough for all the nearby neighbors to wonder who has harmed this small child. This next part is a blur, but this is how I choose to remember it: Nanny rushes over and scoops me up in her squishy, soft arms, and before I know it, we are back at her mobile home. She instructs me, firmly, to open my mouth so she can examine the damage.

“Let me see,” she murmurs, and, a square of toilet paper in hand, tugs on the tooth connected by a single corner. I yelp, once, and out comes the tooth.

“Oh! Is it out?” I ask, sniffling.

“Oh honey. See, that wasn’t so bad now was it?” she asks. She wraps me in a blanket then, and wraps her body around mine, the warmth of her seeping into every shaking part of my body. We read a book, probably the big picture book about the detective bear, and she makes me vanilla pudding with bananas in it, and she strokes my hair, and tells me everything is going to be alright. And, for this little ordinary moment in time, it is.

A month and a half ago, Nanny died. Passed away? I can’t figure out how to say it, can’t determine which way feels less terrible and most true. Her death feels heavy and significant in a way that I’ve never experienced before and I am frustrated with lack of vocabulary to speak about it. I’ve been thinking a lot about death, about what it actually feels like. I wrote a poem in which I wonder if death feels like being born, if it paradoxically feels like being alive in the same way that living sometimes feels lifeless. I’ve been remembering all these memories of Nanny, of the way she moved in the world and the way she cared for people with her body and with her creating: her storytelling, her art, her play, her cooking. How she made us all feel okay, even brave, in moments that proved to be terrifying or disappointing or just plain awful.

And I wished she was there to comfort us during the just-plain-awfulness that was her dying. But of course, she wasn’t. And all I can do is hope that God scooped her up the same way she scooped me up when I knocked my tooth out on the non-monkey bars. That her mother lifted her up and held her hand and said,

“Oh honey, look at this hard thing you did,” and wrapped her up in a blanket and read her a story. It sounds elementary, but when I die, that’s exactly what I’d like my first moment in heaven to be. And I think Nanny would like that too.

It feels poignant and purposeful that her death came during Lent. This time where we are supposed to think about our mortality and our returning to dust as we think about what it means to wait for resurrection.

After Nanny’s passing, I haven’t stopped thinking about all the little deaths we go through in our lives that lead to the capital-D death, and the way we so often cause most of them by making things complicated that have no need or right to be. Like when we snap at our mother, or overreact to our boyfriend, or make a mistake that won’t quit haunting us. Or when we fall in love, or out of love, or make sweeping declarations about what on earth we’re doing with our lives, full of bold words we end up having to eat later. Or when we repent of the ways we are believing untrue things, and start to believe true things instead, which is so painful but so necessary. And how each of these tiny deaths prepares us for the ultimate one, and also, somehow, make us more alive. More human.

My friend and pastor Jessie once said that we are closest to heaven during birth and death, when the veil is lifted the smallest bit, and we glimpse the other side. My grandmother said she saw her spirit shimmer softly out of her body, which I don’t doubt for a minute. My dad said he felt it too, felt the energy in the room shift, and subconsciously glanced up, as if under the veil he might see his own mother.

My boyfriend Casey said to me in a prayer the week before she died: how death reminds us how to live. And this is the irony of all of it.

The veil was lifted physically when Nanny passed through it, but also has been lifted for each of us a little bit from that moment on. That as we think about her death, and death in general, we glimpse the actual hope of holy things that spring up around us when we take a moment to pay attention.

And I think that’s the point of Lent, too. When we allow our minds to sit in the presence of the reality of death instead of run away from it, we understand more of what it means to actually live: renewed, restored, redeemed.

There is a story in the Bible where Jesus takes three of his disciples up onto a mountain and transfigures. He lifts the veil between there and here, and wears his God-self on the outside. The disciples see Moses and Elijah speaking with Jesus (what did they talk about?!), and the three disciples, all probably teenagers, are stunned. Two of them don’t speak a word, and the third, Peter, stammers on about building them little tents. Oh Peter, always so relatable to us people so full of words.

Anyway, there are many wild things about this story, but the thing that feels wild about this story to me in this season is this: they have this insane experience where they literally see heaven on earth, and then they just go back to the rest of the people and carry on like nothing has happened.

What do you do with these moments of transfiguration?

These moments where all of a sudden you catch a glimpse that something else exists that is more or different than the every day ordering of coffee, and sending emails, and speeding up to catch yellow lights? These moments of death, or maybe life, where the truth of existence is revealed in a way that sets up a tent in your own brain and camps out?

Moments of life like a notable success in your work, or having a child, or feeling that first actual warm ray of sun on your skin, where you’re not sure how on Earth you’re supposed to continue about your life when this insane and beautiful thing has just happened.

Or, moments of death like your great-grandma passing away, or losing a job, or getting really sick, or, Lord have mercy, opening your phone to see that more school children have been murdered, and everything you used to care about comes to a screeching halt but the world keeps turning, while you’re left behind, splayed out on the sidewalk.

And more often than not, these transfiguration moments are transformation moments, because that’s, miraculously, how God works. That the death and the life are all tied up together, that they’re both inherently pieces of the other. That in order to fall in love, some parts of you have to die. Or when you face the results of some unfortunate thing you might have done, God forms you into a person that looks a little bit more like Jesus, which is life.

Our lives are a sequence of little deaths that make us more alive. And as we lament all we’ve lost, all we will lose, as the beautiful things die and as we wake up at the end of March to see that the ground is still frozen, I have to believe that God is here, and God will be continue to be here, in the same way that Nanny was there on the day I knocked my tooth out, stroking our hair and promising us that everything will be okay in the end. And because of this, we can face the transfiguration of our days.

Before Nanny’s funeral, my family sat in a big circle and shared memories of her. She was brave, strong, tough, willing to go at it for people she loved. She was honest, gentle, loving, and true. She was creative, scrappy, bold, and formidable. She led our family with unrivaled passion. She loved her people with every single ounce of her being, and she believed that the God to whom she prayed was a real God that listened. In a culture full of complexity and back-up plans and worry and hate, she believed that God was love, and that God could and would do those simple, impossible things she prayed God would do.

And when she went, her God met her at the gate, as God does for us in our little deaths, and our big ones.

And at the gate, we are welcomed, we are restored, we are born.

until next time,

alyssa

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