By Gordon D. Laws Jr., ’00
TWO years ago in March, my fiancée and I drove Grandma from Orem, Utah, to West Jordan, Utah, for a grandchild’s birthday. It was dark when we headed back, and as I started up toward the Point of the Mountain, I looked behind at the sprawling lights wrapped in darkness, going out forever. In the rearview mirror I saw my fiancée sleeping, her head tipped to the left, her face silver in the street lights. I was to marry her the next month. I looked at the sprawling lights again and thought, What does it really mean to be married?
Grandma, next to me, rubbed her drippy nose with a tissue and said, “They got to a point with Derby that they knew he needed taking care of, and the doctors told me I couldn’t do it alone.” W. Derby Laws Jr. was her late husband, a former BYU professor of soil chemistry. In 1985 the arthritis from which he had suffered for 40 years, combined with diabetes and heart problems, crippled him.
“I traveled all over the valley with Ardith Eastman looking at homes to put him in,” Grandma said, “but I just couldn’t find anything.” She rubbed her nose again, unaware of the passing lights or the darkness. “That afternoon at lunch, I told Ardith I didn’t know what to do. She looked at me and said, ‘Ruby, the problem is, you don’t want to put him in any home at all.’ And I said, ‘That’s exactly right.'”
Grandma took Grandpa home—against the advice of the doctors. “I ought to try,” she told them. “I ought to do everything possible before I put him in a home.”
In the car that night, Grandma told the story she had told my father and aunt many times—how she learned lifts to move Grandpa from the bed, how she woke up several times a night and took him to the bathroom, how he never complained. “It was easy taking care of him,” she said. “No trouble at all.”
Why no trouble?
Grandma is from a farm in Ohio and has never cared much for housework, or even being around the house. There are dozens of stories of Grandma leaving to buy bread and not returning for hours, needing the space and time alone. Her tongue has often been as sharp and untamed as her spirit. When she called one of her sisters in Ohio to wish her a happy birthday, the sister complained about Grandma’s being Mormon, turning on her Lutheran heritage, and joining a cult. Grandma listened for a time, then interrupted: “Well, if you want to say terrible things about me and the Church, that’s fine, but at least you ought to pay for it.” And she hung up.
When Grandpa began his final decline in health, Grandma’s family in Ohio and friends out here thought Grandma would go stir-crazy, penned up in a 1950s-era house with Grandpa. But that untamed spirit was actually her greatest strength—she planted trees in the backyard, compiled genealogy, lifted weights at the Orem Recreation Center, and moved Grandpa around the house, feeding and cleaning him.
If you ride enough with Grandma, she will probably tell you some of that—she seems to say whatever comes to her mind, and she thinks a lot about Grandpa. And perhaps, on many occasions, those are just ramblings of an old woman whose thoughts wander from past to present, present to past, rarely making distinctions. But for me that night, there was something about marriage and what makes it work, about serving and being served, about balancing each other. It wasn’t easy for Grandpa to surrender to a tormented body and not become bitter, nor for Grandma to channel her energy yet maintain her sense of self. Somehow they kept their civility; somehow they increased their connection—a connection that would grow to longing after Grandpa’s death in 1986.
Longing seeks wholeness, a wholeness that comes from forging a life together, that is disrupted when one member is gone, that demands restitution. It is a current that runs between two people and defies naming. But I felt it in another talk I had with Grandma—a ride we took my freshman year. She was taking me to lunch and asked me to drive. In the passenger seat, she asked me how school was. Then she was quiet for a moment. She looked, expressionless, at the dashboard as we drove up University Parkway.
“I wish Derby were here,” she said. It had been 10 years since his death.
“Why?” I said, really asking why the topic had come up so suddenly, apparently from nowhere.
She turned, her eyes wide, as if I were some sort of idiot. “Well, I miss him.”
Gordon D. Laws Jr., ’00, a former Brigham Young Magazine intern, is a freelance writer and editor in Boston. Readers may submit personal essays between 600 and 900 words long for After All to afterall@byu.edu.