Edith Estelle Gailey Cummings
November 10, 1922 - October 8, 2015
My beautiful grandmother Edie, who helped raise myself and my three siblings passed away this month. During her funeral, a smoke alarm malfunctioned in the church and it was nearly impossible to hear the eulogy given by my aunt. Afterward, I felt incomplete and wanted to write something that might help assuage the sharp grief I felt, and I'm sure everyone else still carried with them.
Daily life is overwhelmingly mundane… it really is. You work, you clean, you argue about who was the last person to use up the toilet paper and not replace it, you eat dinner with your family, or grab a beer with your best friend. For the most part, life is quite unremarkable.
And then this mundane daily existence is punctuated by sweet moments of contented happiness or sharp feelings of overwhelming grief, anger, and guilt -- and often, the line between these two extremes becomes blurred. Because having one extreme makes you vulnerable to the other. You can’t have love without grief.
I’ve often heard people say you have to “cling” to moments of happiness because you’ll need the memory of these specific moments to get you through the rough times. And I’ve always found that to be odd, this narrow definition of “moments of happiness,” because I think you can absolutely find beauty and comfort in the mundane too, and you can also grow and learn new things about yourself from grief.
This past weekend was a bit of a microcosm of life. Four generations of family from all over the United States gathered together to mourn the loss of our matriarch, Edith, whose legacy included six children, 18 grandchildren, 21 great-grandchildren and 1 great-great grandchild.
We all had a weekend of mundane moments: requesting off work, driving or flying to our destination, fretting about whether or not we remembered to bring toothpaste, and in my case, cursing my GPS when it took us on the “scenic route.” Food was ordered and eaten, flowers delivered, funeral arrangements made, reservations secured.
We all had moments of laughter and reflection. Dennis and Annamarie invited everyone to their house the night before the service so that our first encounter would be, if not completely jovial, at least bittersweet and cathartic -- eating, drinking, cuddling new babies, talking about our jobs or recent retirements, congratulating a recent engagement, and just catching up.
We told funny stories about Edith. We praised her quiet, unrelenting strength and love and toasted her world-famous sticky-buns, comforted by the fact that she was at peace with Grandpa Jack and the two of them were most definitely watching over the festivities.
And, of course, we all had moments of chest-crushing sadness and anger and guilt, where the weight of your grief and loss is so consuming that you can’t breathe, and the amount of tears you’re producing makes you wonder how it’s humanly possible to lose that much water at one time and not faint from dehydration.
But, we also all agreed that this would not be the last time we got together. We are going to continue big family get-togethers for as long as we’re able to and we’re going to laugh loudly and tell funny stories, and toast Grandma’s sticky buns, and celebrate the mundane, the happy, and the sad.#itsacummingsthing