I was with my friend Brad, working with him at his father’s sawmill. Brad’s mother came out and called to him.

“Michael’s needs to call his wife. His grandmother has passed away.”

I saw her face, immediately sorry I’d heard this way. Brad’s mother, like Brad and Brad’s father, were matter-of-fact people, not insensitive, but they usually delivered news with the same quietly firm tone of voice whether remarking on this year’s garden or the death of a loved one. They all cared about people and their feelings, but running a ranch and lumber mill, where death was a hard, but very real fact, they wasted no words on emotion or embellishment.

Brad and I started for the house. Then I stopped and suggested we finish what we were working on before going in. My dear grandmother would be no less dead, and I couldn’t, in the moment, understand what hearing the same news from my wife would do to help me. And I had a job I could do.

Perhaps it is that one of the greatest struggles in life is to control as much of the universe as possible, and that much of our suffering comes because of our difficulty in knowing what we can control and what we cannot. Sometimes we give up on things that need our attention, fooled by appearances or some devil or our own selfishness that we have no power. Sometimes we are fooled into believing we have power where we have none and shouldn’t.

Many times we forget that part of control is reaching out: to God, to our family and friends, to our partners. Some burdens we must bear alone; some we must share.

It is good to know the difference between what we can control and what we cannot. We can derive much peace of mind from understanding this. Much joy, however, comes from expanding our vision and bearing, with others, all sorrows. “Laugh with those who laugh; weep with those who weep,” the scriptures tell us.

For the moment, I could not bring back my grandmother. I could, however, cut the boards I had in front of me.

A little later, when we went in, I called my wife, who was upset. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t drop everything and call (or run home, I suppose). I guess I wonder too. I am often a drop everything sort of person. But I didn’t, and this is not the first time I would let her or others down with my grief. We had been married just a few years, and she did not know how I would react to the passing of someone close. I am still trying to figure that out myself.

I don’t know if everyone looks small when they lay in their caskets, but my grandmother sure did. I’d never thought of her as a little woman (or big for that matter). She had, in my mind, perfectly round checks, even when they were slightly wrinkled. The shell of her, by contrast, made her seem as if she’d been shrunken, not as if she’d lost weight through illness, but actually had been reduced.

As I remember it, the Walnut Hill United Methodist Church was full on the day of her funeral. I sat up front with my brothers and sisters. Other than many people speaking about how wonderful my grandmother was, I don’t remember much. I already knew how terrific she was. I knew this for many reasons, but two have always stood out: 1. She loved me. 2. She, for reasons I could not fathom, loved my grandfather.

Now my grandfather was not a bad person, someone that most people would find difficult to think well of. But as I grew up, he was a polar opposite of my grandmother. She was a warm and wise person who could one minute listen to me talk about poetry and soccer and the next explain (long before I understood what feminists were) why a woman’s place was not making babies and cooking my dinner. All spoken without anger or meanness or even the southern “God bless your stupid heart” sweetness of her contemporaries. My grandfather was a practical person whose primary focus in life was to get things done. He was gruff and when I was small, he always seemed angry. Truth is, he probably just didn’t know how to be around small children (which did not stop him from making four of them himself).

Here is something my wife remembers about my grandmother’s funeral, something I had blocked out or forgotten. The family were all gathered in a room near the back of the large church before the service began. We awaited some people who had yet to arrive, were mulling about nervously talking in those quiet tones of large groups not knowing what to say to each other.

My daughter Angela was very small, and my nieces, one and two years younger, sat with her in the uncomfortable clothes of funerals and churches, the three of them with no clue about death except that it clearly made adults very sad. The three of them, sensing that something awful had happened (otherwise, why would they all be here and all the big people be so quiet?), tried their best to be on their best behavior, but the longer they waited — for what, they could not know — the more aggravated and restless my nieces became. And that restlessness, made the adults upset, though they didn’t scold the children. A lack of scolding in my family is a sure sign that some major shit is going on, so the kids alternately tried even harder to be good and to express their frustration.

My wife tells me that Angela saw that something was going to break and then clasped her cousins’ hands and led them in ring around the rosy. (That this is a song once sung during the Plague is not lost on me.) The cousins got distracted enough to keep from driving their father and grandfather to their own distractions.

Now, I don’t get this, because I can only imagine my brother being mortified and my grandfather disgusted. But I’m told that my grandfather looked at the children playing in the center of the room and smiled. A few tears of joy, I’m told, came down.

When my Grandmother Morris died, it left a hole in my sense of goodness. But I also was glad she was out of her suffering, again, as people usually say when an old person dies. My grandmother had been sick for a long time, so much that my grandfather severely limited the ‌time anyone spent with her to keep her from getting worn out. So most of my grief for her, which continues to this day, has been normal and natural.

The impact of my father and stepfather dying has been much more devastating, and for that reason more powerful in shaping what little might well be good in me. These related events also may have played a role in shaping some of what is bad, or at least unkind, in me.

Growth and maturation means coming to new and different realizations about death. We become newly and differently aware of what mortality means. For most children, death means something is gone and we can’t get it back. An old person we don’t know dies and our parents are sad, or a pet goes the way of all flesh and we bury or flush the body and cry. It dawns on tiny minds that death changes things. As we go through a few more days, we usually realize that life is awful without what we’ve lost, even though we are triggered to sadness or remorse from time to time.

When we are older, perhaps between our teens and young twenties, many of us lose someone who is closer to us, someone we have a greater emotional and perhaps spiritual investment in. The sadness is greater, as is how that death shapes or reshapes our lives. We might get a little angrier. Not the anger that is part of the stages of grief, but lasting anger at the world, the system, God, or ourselves which makes us unable to see clearly.

My high school soccer coach died of a heart attack one summer day. I heard about it when I got home from the time I spent in Florida visiting my grandparents on my mother’s side. Coach Smith had been instrumental in the past year in helping me to grow as a player and a young man during a difficult season. It was the first time I was not a regular starter, and trying to navigate my sophomore year with its typical attendant heartbreaks. He was kind and gentle and always made me think I was on my way to better things at the same time I watched a freshman take “my” spot on the field. Few people can make a headstrong young man accept taking a back seat with grace.

Of course, this death was sudden, unexpected, and the thing that made me so angry about it was that it seemed to come with no dignity. The heart attack happened, and he ran off the road or into a stop sign or something and just died in his truck. He was gone before anyone could help him or he could say goodbye to his family. He was gone just when I was ready to become the good man and player he thought I could be.

But when the anger subsided to a low burn, I could dedicate myself to the potential he saw. I worked harder, without complaint for the first time, for a new coach, one who ran us silly. I tried a little harder in school, and thought more about my spiritual life, maybe praying a bit more honestly. The anger didn’t go away, and sure I got to some form of acceptance. And I loathe the idea of channeling anger. It was there. Period. It was so damn unfair for such a man to be just gone and to die horribly while I was loving life in Panama City Beach. But the anger never became rage.

But when parents die, I believe most of us come to a different acceptance. merely that life is truly unfair and that we are not in control of the universe. When my father and step-father died, I knew not only that people die in a general, abstract sense, but that I would die too. This is odd, since in college, my sophomore year, I seriously considered taking my own life. I had not realized I was struggling then to control a world that had spun away from me and all my best laid plans. But what I mean is that I began to think about what my death would mean for those I left behind, particularly my daughter. My fathers’ deaths made me think, among other things, about the good that both had brought to my life and the unrealized potential for our relationships.

Last week my grandfather died, and last Friday we buried him. He was 95, and I know he was miserable during the last few months. After years of vitality, his body had just said “enough,” he fell down, and never got up again. It was explained that something had attacked his spine, something that probably had been there awhile, and so he was paralyzed from about the chest down. He could use his arms, and sometimes could feed himself, and the last time I saw him was his birthday. I watched him read his birthday cards after my aunt Kay had opened them for him. He read them aloud while I recorded him with the camcorder, so we could post the video for the rest of the family to see.

I didn’t think it was the last time I’d see him, though I should have thought so. The thing was that I almost didn’t do the recording because of the visit before, where all he could find to say to me was that I had made a lot of bad choices. I know it was his illness talking to a degree, but I think it was how he really felt about me. He had moments, I’m sure, of pride and love. But most often, he was disappointed, and for a man who had done so much good in the world, it always surprised me that he could stay disappointed for things in the past. Whatever bad decisions I had made, I couldn’t change them. I could not undo them, and often our conversations left me feeling he expected me to.

So at the funeral, already in a depression haze, I didn’t show, I suppose, a lot of emotion. One brother and a sister expressed concern for me, not willing to say all they were thinking, or still reeling from his passing. My oldest daughter has said that although he was old and sick, because he was such a vigorous person, his death was still a shock. Anyway, I tried to keep to myself, though I had lots of family there, and I suspect people thought I was grieving too. But the truth is I’d already done plenty of grieving over the past year.

A couple years ago, we tried to bury my mother. For years, she had said that all her funeral expenses were covered, that she and my step-father had paid through some long, involved plan. Turns out all that was really paid for was the space of dirt next to her husband.

My sisters and I found this out in the lavish conference room of the funeral home/cemetery where my parents had made their arrangements. We were reeling from her sudden passing, and the grief was made worse because just the week before we had been celebrating my brother Steve’s birthday, a beautifully happy occasion until Mom performed one of her usual random acts of aggressive bitterness by “reminding” us she only had one daughter. Jen had, months before, unwittingly offended her, and despite my sister’s innocence and overtures, could not return to good graces with our mother enough to be considered to have existed. Sadly, our mother spent a lot of time in such a state, rotating her passive-aggressive ire amongst her children. For my sister, this whole unnecessary conflict brought up previous times our mother had been not only unkind but cruel.

So my sisters and I carried this baggage into a room where we listened to a woman wearing a pantsuit the color of a dead flower dipped in yellow paint go over “options” no one expected to deal with, much less pay for, as we sat in stunned, mouth-agape silence. Just a few hours before I had signed a piece of paper on behalf of my family to allow the hospital to turn off the machines keeping her alive. At some point, we left, and as usual, my sisters dealt with the brunt of the problem.

Now Mom’s ashes sit at the top of one of my bookshelves, next to those of our former dog, Cleo. Pretty sure my mother would not approve, but even in death, one gets what one pays for.

I have already lived longer than either my father or step-father were allowed. Given the abuse I have given my body, I do not expect to make it to 95. Since the passings of all these people, my favorite verse from the Bible has been Psalm 90:12: “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Of course, like any person my age, I am more aware of death because so many people in my universe have gone. Each ache or difficult task tells me I am closer than before. But I am also certain I am no more wise than the day my grandmother died. Actually, I hope what my own children and grandchildren are left with when I am gone is the firm belief in my love for them, despite my awfulnesses, so they don’t have to work through the bitterness and anger that stands in the way of grief.

– Michael Neal Morris