It has now been almost exactly a month since my beloved grandfather, Andrew Victor— a rocket scientist by trade but a violinist and cellist by passion— passed away on the afternoon of July 18th. Nine years ago, for Christmas, I had written a retelling of a Transylvanian Roma folktale for him called “The Creation of the Violin” and hand-printed it into a little book. When I arrived at his house the day he died, I saw through my tears that the book was sitting out on the piano, like he had been looking at it again.
In his honor, in his name, because I know he is near and listening, I have made a recording of this story, read aloud. You will find it at the bottom of this post.
It is the story of a little boy who is miraculously conceived with the help of an old woman and a pumpkin, and who creates the first violin in order to win the heart and hand of the king’s beautiful daughter. My grandfather, who began to play the violin at age 4, taught by his own father in their Bronx apartment in 1930s New York, won the heart of the girl he loved at age 16 or 17, and stayed with her, loving her, until the day he died. For me, he really did create the violin. The violin is made of my grandfather, by my grandfather, in my heart, now and always.
He was my violin teacher when I was a little girl, from ages 6 to 18. He gave me the gift of those four strings, the smell of rosin on the horsehair bow, Bach and Mozart, Beethoven and Debussy, and even though I was never a virtuoso at it, I treasure beyond words that because of him, the violin is part of me. I saw him and my grandmother every week of my entire childhood, teenagehood, and two or three times a month whenever I’ve lived at home in California since. Losing him, I have felt the last threads of the landscape of my girlhood vanish, because without him the pattern is changed. He is no longer here, smiling his crooked sweet smile at the dinner table even when he couldn’t hear me well anymore, playing his violin in his local chamber orchestras until the final year of his life, and somehow still smelling in my mind like pipe tobacco even though he gave it up years ago.
The last time I saw him alive was a week before his death, at a family dinner gathering, and I remember that when I hugged him, I held him a little longer than usual because he felt frail. I remember that I kissed his face and pressed my cheek to his, something I don’t normally do, and said I loved him so much, right in his ear so he could hear me clearly, and he said he loved me so much too. A week later, he died very suddenly and unexpectedly a few hours after lunch, with my grandmother at his side. He was 90 years old, almost 91. He lived a beautiful long life and died practically standing, which is about as good as anyone could hope for, but still the grief and the shock have been immense for me, and for my family.
When my mom called me that day, I experienced for the first time how keening is an instinctive, bodily response to loss. I remember that I couldn’t control it; how the words “he’s gone” had hardly landed before I was on my knees, and there was a wail coming from my body that got louder after I hung up the phone and rushed around my house gathering whatever I could into a bag to go be with my family for many nights. It was a guttural sound, from somewhere so deep I didn’t know how I was making it. Later I thought about the sounds women make giving birth. I thought about how women the world over have been traditionally the keeners at funerals. I wondered if these deep throated sounds come from the same place, a uterine place, a place that is a doorway between life and death in us, and knows how to hollow, to bleed, to fill, to nourish, to birth, and to accept death too.
I got to my grandparent’s house in time to be with his body for many hours before the people from the funeral home came. A part of me is still there, sitting around him with my family, holding his hand until it was entirely cold, crying while emptying his pockets, touching all the special objects he always carried, pocketknives and flashlights and his car keys and pens, smoothing back his hair, taking off his shoes and cleaning them a little, just as a way of loving him, and trying to understand— but totally failing— how this man I have known and loved my whole life, who has never not been there in mine, who has read every single word I published and celebrated my every milestone, whose voice and smile and smell and warmth are part of the fundament of my experience as a human being, could suddenly be gone like that. How could that be my grandfather, bundled up in a red cloth bag later that evening, and taken away in a black car? How, how? I understand now, with my whole body, that we have been asking this forever, since the beginning when we covered the our dead in red ochre as we buried them.
I have a collection of my grandpa’s favorite violin songs, xeroxed or hand-scribed by him, here by my bed, and I can hear his voice vividly, saying don’t worry, I love you, don’t cry for me, I had such a beautiful life. But I can’t help but cry, because I miss him, and because I feel somehow like I’ve only now seen life’s face clearly, and it is a terrifying sight, the way Rilke says angels are.
“Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand,” Rilke also wrote, in his Book of Hours. I am reeling with the recognition of its seriousness these days, and clinging on to that hand. I have spent many nights since July 18th trying to fall asleep but feeling a kind of existential bottoming-out there in the darkness, alone in my bed. All the veils pulled back. In such moments I acutely feel the shape of things, the harsh consequence of living, the long lines of all of my ancestors and how everyone before me has walked through this too, how we are all walking through this now, loving so bravely though we will lose everyone and everything in the end, at least in this form. Alongside Rilke I hear Odysseus Elytis, the great Greek poet, talking to the moon in “Of the Moon of Mytilene,” saying to her: “take me take me in your arms, and comfort me for being born!”
And yet, through the midnight waves of existential shock which are so immense they cannot be well- articulated except by the best of poets and mystics, I also feel my grandfather peacefully and profoundly immanent in everything. The night after he died I went out into my parents’ garden to look at the stars and I suddenly and vividly felt him there, ecstatic, zooming around Ursa Major, looking at me from the eye of Polaris, saying it is perfect, this Creation, I am in the perfect harmony of the spheres now, and it is more beautiful than I could ever, ever have fathomed. Do not be afraid. God is This, and Love. All is well. I am closer to you than I ever have been.
I suddenly understood that he gets to be inside the music now, not just making it with his hands, but within it. And that his father, who taught him violin and cello and died when my grandpa was only 19, is with him at last again, and they are playing duets like they did when my grandpa was a boy.
In honor of that music, here is one of my grandfather’s favorite songs, which I heard him playing all throughout my life on the cello.
And below is my re-telling of “The Creation of the Violin.”
Grandpa, you are in every note now. I love you, always.
The Creation of the Violin - a retelling
That retelling was glorious, so beautiful.
Crying a lot from this one. Didn't actually get to the story you wrote yet, just because your tribute to your Grandpa was so profoundly moving. And it reminded me of the two holes in my own heart that have never gone away, and sometimes feel bigger every day.
In 1947 a somewhat cocky veteran who owned his own sailboat, as well as a car and a motorcycle, named Jim walked up to a quiet woman named Myrtle at an ice staking rink in Chicago. He was from the city of Chicago but never really liked the city, always wanted to get out into the forest and the country. She was born and raised in the town her ancestors helped settle after the beginning of the long and ongoing conflict with the native people preciously there- Yankton, South Dakota. I come from one of the very first white settler families in the state, and those prairies are a big part of my soul, as was the prairie soul of my Grandma Myrtle. For her childhood years, Myrtle lived on her family farm where I think she never got over the loss of, I have stood on the bit of prairie where she walked to school every day.
Jim started off his swaggy flirting (honestly as a man, I can say that men are pretty much always the same) by talking shade about women who were in the "service" meaning the military. During the Second World War we had our first big batch of female service members, because the need for people was so great. One of these service members was my Grandma Myrtle, who proudly served as a Navy WAV. We still have pictures of her looking very lovely and smiling in her uniform at my parents house. Myrtle quickly shot down Jim's ego and cockiness, and they began. He was always the accelerator, and she was generally the more cautious brake, and I know have inherited his cockiness and overconfidence in ways that sometimes appeals to people, and sometimes causes problems in in relationship.
Sixty three years later in 2010 Myrtle was kissing Jim on his deathbed after a long and genuinely happy marriage, if imperfect, having raised three children including my father Dick. Around five seasons later in 2011, at a friendly assisted living home in their town in Wisconsin, my Grandma had a stroke on Friday and slipped away quietly on Sunday, at the age of 90. The same age as my Grandpa Jim when he died the year prior.
I loved my grandparents. And I adored everything about my Grandma's South Dakota roots. My parents moved to Tennessee the year before I was born, and I do not yet have any ashes buried in this land, so it feels like a shallow taproot. South Dakota goes back to the 1860s, at least six generations, and I have a messy tribe of living relatives who number in the many dozens if you look hard enough. And all seven of her siblings very much respected and looked up to Myrtle, so being Myrtle Van Epps Trowbridge's older grandson still has sway in one corner of the beautiful rolling land close to the Missouri River, where cowboys and native peoples and buffalo tenders and medicine men and shopkeepers and ranch hands and grandmothers and grandfathers have been trying to live and love since time immemorial.
In the next couple of seasons, it seems likely that the Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee will fully fire up again a long dormant partnership with the Diocese of South Dakota, where around half of the people are Native American, and have been forming for many years an Indigenous Christianity rooted in Earth and Simplicity and Peace. Peace comes hard to South Dakota, it has long been and still is a pretty violent land with very violent men on all sides committing atrocities to each other and to women and to the land. And it is not just the more recent colonization of Euro-Americans that is my family's heritage that has brought this violence, the Lakota people were notoriously violent and did some shameful things too out of an imbalanced understanding of warrior culture and vengeance. In the 13th century I believe there was evidence of a small genocide by tribespeople against another tribe.
So, I have been obsessed with making something happen between my grandmother's land and the land my parents settled in the 1980s, a homeland for the Cherokee who are now mostly absent, a land of dammed rivers and creeks and beautiful forests and waterfalls and an emerging Appalachian culture of respect for land and love for different cultures, for a long time. Well before my Christian journey in this denomination began. I don't always love our colonized structures and attachments to the American state. But I do love our understanding of Jesus the Christ, of a Cup of Salvation that can offer a God of Love for all people.
I weep tears of memory and adoration for my Grandma Myrtle. And my Grandpa Jim. She is buried out there, in the family plot at the cemetery in Yankton. She haunts me. My Grandpa haunts me a lot too, he was utterly devoted to Myrtle and she was his cup of salvation that saved him from loneliness and his own demons.
The last time I saw my Grandpa healthy, in 2009 when I visited up there sensing I would not get many more chances, he said one of the more simple and prophetic things anybody has ever told me. He didn't seem like a very prophetic person, and was not traditionally religious. But when he dropped me off at the airport at the end of my visit, he told me as he shook my hand:
"It's good to be loved"
Then I got out of the car and walked into the airport. A year later I was visiting him on his deathbed with my Dad. At least I got to see him in his last stages, where he said some more prophetic things. I never got to see my Grandma in the final months of her life, like the quiet, soulful prairie bird of abiding peace that she seemed to be, she just slipped away when God was ready to bring her home, home to her beloved prairie, home to her many relatives, home to Jim, where they both knew that it was very good to be loved.
Thank you so much for your story Sylvia. And many blessings for letting me share my own, it is a loss I have never fully reconciled. I love my parents, they are ex-Peace Corps do gooders, but I honestly have a hard time connecting with them or with anyone more than my Grandma. We all carry these scars and these holes, these rivers of grief that can birth new life.
Your mighty heart is making ours braver. I pray tell I can see that prairie country again soon, sit by my Grandma's grave, look up into the big sky and the river below, and know all is whole. We are all God's most beloved children, and we can and should live in peace here on Earth.