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.
Mmmm thank you soul much for this beautiful poetic story!! I listened to your lovely voice while snuggling our cat and holding the tiny heartbeat of our growing child in my womb. What perfect medicine to come across this morning. 🙏🏻✨🎻💗
How beautifully you honour your precious grand father. Your words remind me of hearing of the passing of my father, too early at age 60, changing everything and simultaneously charging me to become more than he or I ever dared possible. Thank you for sharing. Sending love 🕊️
Oh Sylvia, I was just pouring tears upon tears while reading this and listening to your story. Such beauty and heart-hewn grief and profound love within it all. It also brought me right back to the memory of being with my grandmother as she passed away a few years ago - holding her hand as she died, how it inexplicably felt like a birth in reverse, and then the shift in the cosmos as life would forever be changed and the very threads of me were braided into a new form. And I’m still asking: How?
Thanks for the memories you told of your grandfather and the story. It's remarkable how the pure tones eminating from a violin can fill a space. Reminds me of stories my grandmother wrote. Google: The Sparrow by Jane Tyson Clement.
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.
Mmmm thank you soul much for this beautiful poetic story!! I listened to your lovely voice while snuggling our cat and holding the tiny heartbeat of our growing child in my womb. What perfect medicine to come across this morning. 🙏🏻✨🎻💗
How beautifully you honour your precious grand father. Your words remind me of hearing of the passing of my father, too early at age 60, changing everything and simultaneously charging me to become more than he or I ever dared possible. Thank you for sharing. Sending love 🕊️
What a beautiful and moving tribute. Thank you so much for sharing. Sending love to you and you family.
This might be the most beautiful thing I have ever read.
What a beautiful way to honor your grandfather. Thank you for sharing your grieving heart, and your gift of story. ♥
Oh Sylvia, I was just pouring tears upon tears while reading this and listening to your story. Such beauty and heart-hewn grief and profound love within it all. It also brought me right back to the memory of being with my grandmother as she passed away a few years ago - holding her hand as she died, how it inexplicably felt like a birth in reverse, and then the shift in the cosmos as life would forever be changed and the very threads of me were braided into a new form. And I’m still asking: How?
Sending so much love to you.
Such tender words - I feel your loss, your grief. May your heart smile with the fullness of the love he gave you.
Thanks for the memories you told of your grandfather and the story. It's remarkable how the pure tones eminating from a violin can fill a space. Reminds me of stories my grandmother wrote. Google: The Sparrow by Jane Tyson Clement.
Heartbreakingly beautiful words ❤️
Thank you all with my whole heart for your kind words here. Each comment has meant so much. xoxo