The Eyes of Love

As the dust rose from the tires of the departing hearse from Whitman’s funeral home as it headed down the drive, I stumbled away from the big house with its wrap-around porch and the swing where my grandmother had spent hours telling me about her life growing up on the farm as we shelled peas and strung beans. With eyes blinded by tears and the bright sunlight, I picked my way across the yard to the old barn. The animals had long been moved to the big new barn and the place where Grandma had taught me to milk a cow while the barn cat wove in and around our legs was empty now, except for the mice who nested in the hay bales that had remained, serving as a reminder of the activity that had once imbued the place with life.

The barn had always been my refuge; the place where I could escape from my two brothers when they were being particularly obnoxious or outright horrible to me. The hayloft offered a place to disappear for hours into whatever book I was reading at the time. And it was here where I now sought solace; a quiet place to give way to my need to weep and mourn for the loss of the one person who always listened to my hopes and dreams; the Grandma who would wrap me in her arms and rock away my anger or my fears. She never told me to be practical or gave me that line about needing to toughen up and be a man. We never said the actual words, but she knew, and I knew she knew, that I was different from my brothers, that being “sensitive” and not liking sports was not something I was going to grow out of. She didn’t push me to be something I was never going to be and never asked me when I was going to start dating girls. She knew. And she didn’t care. When I said I wanted to go away to college, she sat with me while I filled in the forms. She sewed and sold aprons and baked pies for the farmer’s market, so I’d have walking around money on top of what my scholarship paid for.

I lie there in the loft, remembering my last trip home at Christmas. She had rung me up specially to tell me to come home and bring my boyfriend so she could meet him. When I expressed surprise that she even knew I had one, she told me that just because she was old, that didn’t make her a fool. Of course I had a boyfriend, “You are not the one-night-stand type like your brothers.” And when I said I didn’t think any of the rest of the family would want to meet him, “This is my home and what I say goes. If they don’t like it, they can spend Christmas somewhere else.” And when we arrived, I could tell that everyone else had been told they’d better keep any unwelcoming thoughts to themselves. I won’t say we were greeted with open arms (except by Grandma), but they were on their best behavior. Grandma more than made up for their coolness by her natural acceptance of my partner, Martin.

When I got the call to come home quickly, I made the journey alone. Martin was away on a business trip abroad and would follow as soon as possible. Grandma had waited for me. Over the next few days, during bouts of wakefulness, we slipped back into our roles of adoring grandson and protective grandmother, sharing stories of my childhood and hers. She told me she thought Martin was a good, kind man and said I should marry him and raise a family. She gave me a passbook for a bank account she’d opened when some of the farm acreage had been sold off, saying she’d put the money away just for me so I could pay surrogate or adoption fees sometime in the future. I had protested that it was too much and not fair to my brothers, but she just said they’d be getting the farm between them and this was her way of ensuring that I got my fair share. She told me that I was her bright shining star of a boy and I had always made her proud. And I told her how much I loved her and how much her confidence in me had made me the man I’d grown to be. After that, she grew quieter, sleeping most of next two days.

This morning when I crept into Grandma’s room with my cup of coffee, planning on reading to her from her favorite book of Dickenson poems, the nurse looked up and just nodded. I knew then that today would be Grandma’s last, so I sat there at her bedside, holding her hand through the next several hours. My brothers came in to say good-bye to her still form. Neither was particularly demonstrative, but they each gave her a kiss on the forehead before going back into the fields to work. It was late afternoon, as the sun began its descent, when Grandma left us. The nurse must have had Whitman’s on notice because they showed up before we’d barely had time to take it in. My brothers made no objection to the quickness with which she was being removed from the only home she’d ever known, and my protests were ignored.

Now I watched the light fade from the sky through a small hole in the roof. I felt a deep sense of aloneness. And that’s when I heard it: the quiet purring of a barn owl. I scanned the loft and found a pair of eyes staring back at me. My brain knew the solemn eyes were those of the owl, but my heart saw the loving eyes of my grandmother, telling me I’d never be alone, she would always be with me.