Hallelujah, I’m Ready

[Written circa 2006]

 Hallelujah, I’m Ready 

     by Googlelas Brimemer

Grandfather Reimer died when I was ten. He had been sick for a long time. Unlike grandfather, grandmother was quiet and taciturn and I rarely saw her. My grandfather, at this time, lay in a bed and could not move his arms or talk. He turned his head toward people now and then when they spoke, but that was the only sign of life in him. “Unnggnnnnne,” he sometimes moaned in response to someone’s question or speech.

     “You will be in heaven soon,” a preacher would say.

     “Unggnnnnnn gngnnn,” my grandfather would reply, meaning most likely that he wished so, though he was mortally afraid that God might not let him in. 

        “I pray for you every night and often during the day, too,” my granduncle said to him, bending low over the bed and speaking it deliberately into grandfather’s ear. I watched from the side of the room. The purple bed cover, up under his chin, with his little bald head above it on the white pillow, still rises clearly in my inner sight at the recollection of that phrase.

     “Unngggnnggnnngnn,” grandfather replies, meaning that he appreciates it and hopes it will not come to nothing, since he hardly thinks himself worthy to be taken into glory. His round face, with its red spots on the cheeks, and the blunt nose thick with hard breathing, rest sideways on the pillow and the eight men around his bed, most sitting, one or two standing holding their hats, all bend closer and pay attention when he makes a sound.

     A stroke. To me then that meant something scary and dangerous, though not within my ken. There is an old Low German joke about a man who has a stroke and dies at the breakfast table. “Jo, sayjdse toaw Auntjemowem, nan funk a met eijenmol aown tow rutshe, nan viera veichj.” My grandfather was a sensible man, in some ways, always reading the Bible, forever asking people about the state of their souls. A righteous man, he compulsively worried about the likelihood of his entry into God’s beyond. Once, when we included him on a car trip to Abbotsford, British Columbia, he required us kids, every time we stopped, to run over to a garage or grain truck or sidewalk and hand out tracts to mechanics, car salesmen, moms pushing baby carriages, to everyone. Even to adults in cafés and businesses. My mother hated him for it. 

     I helped him one day feed the cattle in his low, yellow, flyblown, manure-spattered barn. If you could call it a barn. It stank to high heaven. He did not own one of those nice barns that make you wish to step inside it. Dark and dingy, its low ceiling floated there heavily just above the heads of the standing cows. It reeked of chicken, cattle and pig dung. Grandfather said nothing while we worked, the cows chewing, swishing tails and peeing around us. He was a little man, fat, short and short of breath, uncommunicative about everything except the Bible and salvation. One felt one’s sinfulness in his presence. 

     In 1954-56, as I remember it, in their little house near Steinbach a tall faded green-lidded barrel held buns. The little kitchen smelled of grandma’s baking. Her buns tasted different than all the other women’s buns I have ever eaten in the intervening 50+ years, and I loved the taste of them. Whenever we came to visit, I’d go tentatively over to the grass-coloured tin bin and lift the cover to find, every time, brimming there, often-still-warm, heaven-scented, lard-made, happiness-engendering buns. Tentatively, because I distrusted women in kitchens. My mother scolded us for wanting food, for being hungry kids. She—my fat, smiling, shortsighted grandmother—simply kept her happy back turned away from me, facing the sink, and said nothing. In other words, help yourself, Leigh Douglas. 

     Then, in the living room, a few steps away when I entered it, sat grandfather with his bald head, his wire-rimmed glasses, and his Bible in his lap, reading, not looking up immediately. I did not miss him when he died. He had been too solemn to create “missing” in others. He smiled little, he challenged a lot, he spoke only of the Bible, and never of anything such as the welfare of cattle, the location of chokecherries in the bush behind the pasture, the roughness of the idle of a car engine, the type of wood he was burning in his furnace in the basement, the wood stacked under the stairs or the pleasantness of an evening sunset or moonshine. 

     He did not notice our world. The world was not too much with him. He disliked this world and fervently wished for the other one. That is why he wondered if he would be allowed into heaven by God. Somewhere in him, for some reason, he believed that he’d been evil. He sensed, I think, that by insisting on the other world, and ignoring this one in its beauty given to us by God, he had sinned and forced all those he’d sired, and the generations to follow, to fear this earth and to continue to revile what God had made, to continue to teach such fear to their children. So, he felt he’d sinned—I suspicion he agonized over it—a great sin and wondered if God would let him in.

     What follows is one thread of thinking that I have encountered within myself, and certainly not the only way of looking at his life. He was sick for many years before he lay on his deathbed. He was a very sick man who preached incessantly. He died, finally, to his own relief and ours, too, and left this world to heal itself of his intolerance, of his pressing need to confront all beings in this place with the fear that they might not be good enough. He died finally, hallelujah! Praise be to God who in His wondrous mercy loves his children!