My grandmother, Leticia D’costa, died last Tuesday, and we buried her yesterday.
I feel lucky in that I feel little sadness at her going; those she had recently spent time with have said she could tell her time had come, and for her this meant she would finally be welcome in God’s realm. Her death was very peaceful, with enough time for her family to see her alive one last time.
That hasn’t stopped me from having many late nights, trying to grapple with how I felt about her, what she meant to me. I have always known she meant a lot and that she was the most significant figure in my life growing up, but there always seem to be layers and layers of emotional and cognitive nuance when you are confronted with the summation of a person’s life. I am glad that my prediction that my grandmother’s passing would have hit me harder than any other sadness I have experienced (from real tragedies or depressive moods) has borne out true.
From the thoughts that have kept me up many nights, I managed an impromptu eulogy of sorts at her burial. (It is was not the spoken-in-mass event the word usually refers to, there may be a more technically correct term.) It rang true as I spoke it and I would like to keep a much-extended version of it somewhere.
My grandmother was devout. Anyone who knew her knew that. Since before I moved to Canada, she was an active volunteer in her local parish, assisting in everything and anything she could be useful in. She also attended daily mass, which involves a discipline I could not imagine ever having. My childhood priest seemed to have come out of retirement to administer her funeral, his hand jittering with Parkinson’s as he waved the incense censer over her casket. His homily wound up being a personal eulogy for my grandmother as well, “the local saint of the church”, full of devotion and toughness if toughness was required.
Growing up I experienced this profoundly in home life; At seven or eight, soon after the gulf war, I moved to Canada from the middle east with my parents and my baby brother. My father’s sister (with her husband and two children) had done the same a year ago, from Kuwait, escaping ground zero of that same war.
We moved to a suburb of Toronto specifically on the recommendation and assistance of my last paternal aunt, who had moved to Canada much earlier (perhaps a decade?) and had brought my paternal grandparents to care for them. My grandfather spent his last decade living with my newly-arrived aunt, separate from my grandmother for reasons that are similar but also very different from western family motifs and two generations now removed from what modern family seems to mean. If nothing else, it eased the burden of the children to distribute the care of their parents. Also, as my grandfather settled into his new home, his old room could be used to house us for the months between my parents finding their own jobs and finalizing their own house.
What follows is the story of every day in elementary school and high school.
There were six grandchildren, each one younger than the other by a year, two girls book-ending the sequence. Every day at 6 o’clock in the morning I would be woken to get ready for school, driven to my aunt’s house before my parents made the hour-long slog to Toronto for work. I would catch perhaps an hour more of sleep if I could, curled in the living room of my aunt’s house.
My day unfortunately didn’t end when school ended. My grandmother was always the last teach who self-assigned herself to our care. She had been a schoolteacher in India, and she did not let that go in retirement.
Immediately upon coming home I had to copy one page from a book in my own hand, cursive until my school forced me to print. I remember one day I decided that the torment of copy writing would go easier if I wrote a story instead. I did and proudly showed it to my grandmother as an innovation in the art of homework. My reward? Having to go back and copy a page out of a book regardless :P If there was a lesson she was trying to teach, I still have not fully deciphered it.
There was always a round of prayer each day. The prayers were usually the same, and were far above and beyond whatever was said at Sunday mass. I no longer remember most of them, but I do remember the special occasions such as the Novena, when the rosaries would come out and the prayers were both excruciatingly longer but also more intricate, rhythms of music almost, verses and choruses repeated with a bridge added every tenth repetition. After second homework and prayer, there could be play. The one or two hours of television that were earned just before my parents came back at 7pm to pick me up were daily rewards. Eventually that expanded to Nintendo and a computer that was different from my family’s.
The elder grandchildren remember a grandmother whose sternness was always ready to come out if we toed the line, but one which softened as she grew older and high school lead to after-school peer groups.
The Indian school system was not one of cognitive awareness. It was far more important to learn things by rote (penmanship as mentioned above, times tables, bible readings) than it was to learn the hows and whys of something. When I talk about my grandmother as a schoolmistress I remember no lesson plans, just rigour and discipline. I can’t say I advocate for it as an educational system, but I also don’t remember registering school-assigned homework as a thing to be feared in comparison to my grandmother’s simple exercises.
Where this discipline really keeps me up at night is in how it related to her moral sense. As said before, every day that I knew here were days of her active participation and devotion to church. But her actions in many ways seemed invisible because there was in a sense little desire for leadership or recognition when it was not affecting the godliness of whatever activity she was assisting in; all recognition and assistance came naturally, in a sense, although I don’t know if my grandmother ever thought of it at all.
Her devotion extended so far down into our family life; all grandchildren were altar servers, members of choir, church volunteers in one way or the other, which we would have to navigate as we grew older.
I remember being interested in scripture as a young kid because it was one of the many interesting things for nerds to attach to; somehow a throwaway and honest answer about whether I would like to study it turned into some excitement between my grandmother and her nun sister because they could start picking out the scholastic brotherhoods I had clearly just said I was feeling a vocation for; I managed to hide behind my parents as they told two disappointed women that an elementary-school child wasn’t really capable of deciding they wanted to enter the brotherhood.
I remember family arguments, as large families tend to have (I have not mentioned the cousins of cousins, or the title of uncle/aunt being handed out generously to friends and close neighbours) where one wing turns against the other wing and snippy remarks are shared in after-party sessions when everyone else has gone home. I remember my grandmother always making sure to assert that those kinds of things had no place.
I remember telling my parents that I was having doubts about Christianity and it not being received well; I remember admitting this to my grandmother with an even deeper fear and having the response almost shrugged off: You’re a good kid, you’ll always be doing the work of god even if your thoughts are misleading you. In a strange way she inadvertently cemented the idea that I could have a spiritual integrity without participating in the pomp and circumstance of a particular custom. I am sure she wold not be a fan of that, because to her the customs were to be followed because their place as conduits to godliness were self evident from the only authority that really mattered, God’s. (I am sure I was looked at by her with much concern for being disobedient, but I don’t think she ever felt a concern that I did not love my life striving to be good.)
Growing up non-theist has always been a strange conflict in that I never had reason to hate theism (my family, while not necessarily progressive, has also never seemed to care about opposing people that were not immediately threatening them) and because the person I held in highest regard has always been deeply and stubbornly devout.
And I always feel I intellectually understand this but I always find out in crashing waves that I don’t; the way I engage with the world, with people around me, with justice, is very much derived from my grandmother as an example.
I definitely do not conduct myself under any banner of God (although again, I care not about denying a presence that is not actively threatening me) but I do find myself compelled to follow in the spirit of other things; feminism, expanding rights, harm reduction, and so on. I sometimes semi-bitterly say that as a straight cis man feminism can fit into the role of Catholicism quite easy, grace and original sin having gender-critiquing equivalents, while intersectional awareness creeps its way into everything the way the holy ghost used to.
But I also am slowly becoming aware that, like my grandmother, my conduct is very much at odds with the North American traditions of individualism and desire for Great Men(TM). I have often spent nights torn about why I feel compelled to putter around communities gardening kindness, when it feels like the public convention of morality (which I want to follow for selfish reasons of acceptance) is to be a figure, an avatar, a leader, to protest viscerally as Jesus arguably did.
But the answer to that feeling might be to look at my grandmother, who cared not one whit that she will be a mere name in a record book long after those who remember her are gone, with no great act ever being attributed to her beyond those so unimportant as tending to a church and raising families to live their lives justly. There will be times for toughness (I have, when no other alternative has existed, had to confront peers and CEOs about very dire things) but maybe she held onto a secret truth that discipline and ceaseless gardening is just as important as leadership.
I do not have my grandmother’s devoutness, and I do not have my grandmother’s single-mindedness. I do not feel the same promise of my life’s goal waiting for me when I do. Unfortunately, through my depression or my social frailty or my other lineages or growing up secular in North America, there are always too many other options I can take besides the “right one”, and unlike her, the other possibilities are very thinkable.
But what she planted in me was a kernel straightforward righteousness, and hopefully I will find my own way to live as resolutely through whatever I determine to be grace and weakness and devotion.
Leticia D’costa, 1922-2016