Death is the dusty whiff that
heralds heaven’s tears splattering on bone dry earth.
Grief’s curtains, lavender-grey
absterge ((Absterge: To wipe off, to cleanse.)) high desert valleys and earth moves forth.
I grew up in a family where the afterlife was all around us. My father often told about how he had seen an angel. In time, the story retold became an encounter with Jesus Christ. He said that he was visited in the bathroom while shaving, that he could see the angel’s bare chest through an opening in his white robe. Dad would hold out his thumb and index finger measuring an inch, describing how the hair on the figure’s legs stood straight out.
My mother would describe a period early in their marriage when my father would leave for his paper route. She says she would hear Dad’s footsteps exit through the front door, but soon the screen door would creak open again and footsteps would return up the hall. A man with black eyes would come sit on the side of the bed and stare at her, as she lay frozen. She would pray, and the man would eventually disperse through the ceiling.
My siblings took these cues and began sharing their own stories. My oldest brother came to the point where he spoke to angels and other supernatural creatures daily.
My grandmother Tabitha Adair Kimball died in my bed when I was eleven years old. She was born in 1894 in Orderville, Utah and later moved to Widstoe in Garfield County, where, at the age of nineteen, she buried her first child. My father was born in 1925 in Salt Lake City, the seventh of her nine children.
Grandmother was very unhappy with her name, pronounced Ta-BITH-a or Bertha for short. It seems her resentment continued until the 1960s when the TV series “Bewitched” became popular. The daughter of the main character was named TAB-a-tha (the emphasis on the “tab” rather than the “bith”). Grandmother apparently loved the nuance and insisted everyone address her by this newer, sexy version.
The way my father spoke about my grandmother leads me to believe that she likely suffered from depression. She did all of her housework after the children went to bed and then slept in until afternoon. The kids were left to fend for themselves, doing odd jobs like shoe-shining, selling newspapers, shagging golf balls, and even panhandling to get meals. Grandfather was the sort that struggled to keep work. It didn’t sound like he was home much.
My own impressions about my grandmother were simply that she was lonely, geriatric, hard of hearing, difficult to live with, and odoriferous with the muscle rub Ben-Gay.
My parents found chairs for people to sit on and pay their last respects to Grandma as she lay unconscious on my bed. While our relatives sat in a complicated ensemble, fidgeting and introducing themselves, Uncle Ernest sat next to my mom. He was a patriarch, a high priest who offers one-time revelations that map out Church members’ lives and offer their tribal lineage. Uncle Ernie soon sat forward and began whispering to my mother, telling her that deceased members of the family were waiting outside the door. He would say a name and my mother would nod her head, granting each visitor permission to enter the room.
My mother walked me down to the room a few hours before Grandmother passed. The light was soft, the air was thick, and I watched as her chest heaved up and down; the death rattle had set in. Eventually, my exhausted mother went to bed, leaving my father to sit alone with his mother as she passed away.
After the funeral workers removed the body, the sheets were pulled and washed, the bed was made, and Grandmother’s things were gathered and boxed. Then Mom announced that I had my room back.
But alarm bells were going off in my head. I was the youngest child and had very little power. Maybe Mother thought that the proximity to ghosts would build character, but I mustered the courage to push my dad and brothers into hauling the bed to the garage, shampooing the rugs, scrubbing the walls, and swapping out the furniture. It still took some time before I was willing to sleep alone again in that room, not just because my grandmother had died there but because deceased family members had received permission to enter.
Years later my father passed away in a shared hospice room in Salt Lake. I was sitting in an adjacent room when mother came and announced that he had stopped breathing. The few who were present gathered quickly to say goodbye, to tell him that he was loved. I placed my hand on my father’s chest and rested it there as his heart stopped. I phoned siblings, kissed my mother, squeezed Father’s hand, and returned home to my family.
Fathers and sons are not exactly friends. I resented that he had placed me in a hard neighborhood with poor schools; that I worked from a very young age. Then, I didn’t understand the gift of labor and struggle. I also didn’t fully understand the brokenness of my father’s childhood, nor do I still. When he passed away, he left a hole in my life, and I never fully grieved for him.
Some years later, during a summer’s night, I got up from bed and wandered to my living room. There, a young, handsome man, well dressed with slicked back hair, was sitting on my couch thumbing through one of my antique books, clearly enjoying the item as much as I do. I locked eyes with the man as I sat across from him.
And I forgave him.
Maybe he forgave me, too.
Memento mori
Beautiful story, Tom. Thanks.
This is very Stegner-esque in its description of Mormon life, from patriarch to spooked child. Thanks, Tom.
While nothing in my own family history is quite as ongoing as this story suggests it was/is in the Kimball family, this post immediately brought to mind stories that have been told — stories I heard only once, in a family which tended to retell the same stories scores of times. I’ll have to think about what that means, and write them down, because my nieces and nephews will probably never hear of them otherwise.
This really is a lovely story, Tom, well told. Thank you for offering to post it here.
Tom, thank you for sharing this very personal set of experiences. I know people who are more sensitive to their departed family members, and I consider it a gift, one that is very special. My grandfather told a story about an angelic visitation, and we are fortunate enough that his wife, who walked in just as the visitation was ending, wrote it all down for the family. It is a great treasure.
I feel attachments to my departed ancestors that I have learned about, but not in this intimate way. Yet I realize that the veil is often thinner than we think, and sometimes we miss things that we should pay more attention to. Very fitting to share this on Halloween.
Beautiful story. And wanting to emphasize the “Hallowed Evening” before All Saints Day, this is why I don’t like the way our Halloween traditions have developed into a bacchanalia of blood, gore, and candy. (Ok, I like the candy). I am not disturbed by genuinely gory things and especially not the dead – I know too many of them. I just wish they could be treated with more respect like in this story.
Thanks for leaving us all a little the richer.
The first time I heard this story from you Tom, my eyes watered up a little. Reading it again had the same effect. This thread that runs from one soul to the next is particularly strong in family lines. There is something to it.
Beautiful, Tom. Thanks for sharing.
Well-written, and I really enjoyed reading it. Thanks for sharing.
Very interesting read. Similar stories in my wife’s family. I have had some experience with my Dad communicating with me all my life (he was killed in VietNam) but generally through other people–not first hand apparitions. Had a couple scary “ghost stories” happen as a child, but you can never tell for sure whether they were imagined at that age or not.
You’re a decent writer Tom!
I love stories like these! You are such a gifted writer, Tom; I was entertained from the beginning. That first paragraph had me chuckling when the personage evolved into Jesus…hmm, sounds so familiar. Thank you for sharing these experiences and your heart.
A very well-told story, Tom. I like the window it gives us into a unique Mormon ritual of dying. Thanks for sharing.
You’ve written a dynamite intro and conclusion for this engaging story, Tom. I particularly like your lead sentence. When I read a story like this, I realize how important it is that we write down our memories and give them some kind of a narrative shape. I’m sure you benefitted from writing this story and, of course, your family will treasure it through the generations.
Nice writing, Tom. That’s very impressive about the culture of people so close to the dead. There is an intimate feeling about this that your writing conveys–something I’ve had little-to-no experience with. Thanks for sharing.
Tom, You never cease to fascinate! I was touched by the ending and could not help but imagine how I would have reacted to taking my bed back after Grandma’s death. i think experiences of the dead are more common than we realize.
Fantastic “magic realism.” Terrific!
We’ll done, Tom. Write down another 40-50 anecdotes and you’ve got yourself a nice memoir/story collection.
Thank you all for the kind words. I’ve told these stories in bits over the years and it was cathartic to put it all down. Just over a year ago I was invited to write an essay on death for a collection on the subject. Quickly I put a framework for this story down and have been tinkering with it since. This is what spilled out.
I suppose sharing these stories offers folks a glimpse into what it was to grow up Kimball. I consider myself a reluctant atheist and found it immeasurably tricky to respectfully and honestly share stories like these about people I love and respect while retaining my skepticism.
Maybe this is why I chose not to divulge the full nature of the vision I had of my father. I’ve received criticism both ways for not doing so, but I believe we are the sum of our past, and this allowed me to present myself as no less peculiar than the rest of my kin. Which is true.
One thing about my father was that he liked to tell stories. He would often tell the same story many, many times. As a kid I rolled my eyes when one of his favorites came pouring out. When he passed, it quickly occurred to me that I would never hear those stories again–and damnit–now I got questions! Mourning the loss of those stories, I’ve tried to go out of my way to ask now, and to write the answers down.
It was rewarding asking family about their memories of my Grandmother Kimball. That women whom I feared and avoided as a kid now holds a tender place for me. My oldest sister told me that she never heard my grandfather ever say one negative thing about grandma. My mother repeated that appraisal. If my railroad-bull grandfather could hold this kind of respect for her, then maybe I needed to do so as well.
In the blurred photo above of my grandmother taken when she was 19, the same year she lost her firstborn child, I find myself haunted as I consider that I will never know the world she faced. I hope I respected her in my attempt to honestly share my encounter of her passing. If I had one wish for myself. I wish that instead of simply calling her Grandmother like I did, that I could have called her Grandma Tabitha and told her that I think her name is beautiful.