christinatheastonishing183
St. Christina the Astonishing, from an image by Giselle Potter

I was born on Saint George’s Day, which, to my mind anyway, makes my grandmother Mary George one of my patron saints. Canonizing one’s grandmother, particularly when said grandmother is Episcopalian and, more importantly, alive, may seem like the height of vanity, even sacrilege. But if you met my grandmother, you’d see that she’s at least as sweet as St. Christina the Astonishing, who, after waking up at her own funeral, avoided the company of others, claiming that the stink of their sins was too much for her. My grandmama Mary would never dream of mentioning anyone’s sin-stink.

I just got back from a visit with my grandmother, and it’s got me thinking about the essences of things. Grandmama Mary, as I have said, is sweeter than sweet, and as her health fails, it seems like that sweetness is concentrated, made not sweeter but better, more refined and rare.

A few weeks back, she took a bad turn, and a full regiment of medical personnel manifested at her bedside: hospice nurses and directors, doctors, and her night nurse (who’s practically family at this point). My grandmother woke up, groggy and barely there, fighting free of the shadows to ask, “Has everyone here been introduced?” She is a gracious hostess to the end.

When I arrived last week, grandmama was more confused than I’ve seen her. Later she perked up, and we spoke, slowly and quietly, of life and of her beautiful daughters and how dapper my grandfather looked in my favorite photograph of him, wading out into a long-ago lake, but when I first arrived, she was muddled with sleep, and when her nurse wheeled her into the living room and asked, “Do you know who’s visiting?” All she could manage was, “People who I love.”

Herodotus wrote that we can know no life happy, no man virtuous, until we see their end. When I first read that, I thought it a remnant of a more heroic age. I imagined Achilles doing battle with the river Scamander, Hektor kissing his infant son goodbye inside Troy’s soon-to-be-ruined walls. But in my grandmother I can see that simpler virtues, properly cultivated, achieve their own sort of heroism. At the end, when we are most ourselves, a true and simple goodness can shine forth. And we can look around us and say, “These are the people that I love.”