Friday, July 22, 2016
As read at the Memorial Service for Maria Beck Grechko
Friday, July 22, 2016
As I am in Ireland completing an internship this summer I am unable to attend the memorial service today for my grandmother, Maria Beck Grechko. The invitation to write something to be read at the service was presented to me and I welcome this offer with thanks and appreciation. I am pleased to write not just so that I may express my love and admiration for my grandmother, but also so that I can be a support to all those in attendance today. One of our great strengths as human beings is our ability and desire to come together and share in our life experiences, whether positive or negative. Indeed, in times of joy or sorrow we flock together to support and reassure each other. We jump headlong into the emotion of our fellow man and in the extremes of emotions we see occasion of humanity’s best capacity for love and compassion. I thank everyone here for bearing some of the emotion my family feels today in remembering and celebrating my grandmother’s life so close after the passing of my grandfather just a few weeks ago.
Being away, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the passing of my grandparents. There seems to be a sort of cruel irony to the circularity of life, to the ever-constant march of time. Being the youngest in my family, I always found myself striving to grow up. I wanted to “catch up” to everyone else, to be their age, to experience what they were experiencing. It was only much later that I realized time did not stop for others as I attempted my mad scramble to catch up to them. I got older, and so did they. I think my grandmother especially realized how I felt about this as a young kid. She was always there for comfort when I was feeling the odd one out as the youngest. She was patient and kind and loving but stern and demanding and exacting as well. She held us all to the standards she set for herself and expected the time-tested traditions of her life to be honored with us too. I saw my grandmother as a solid pillar of the family, always here to remind us of structure and form but also to serve as support and kind love. Now my grandmother is gone. She has passed on and I never caught up. I am thankful for her life, though, and for how kind she was to me, how well she served as grandmother to my sister, my cousins, and myself. Just before she passed, we were blessed to have welcomed my cousin’s first child, Allie Kate into our family. Watching as grandmother met great grandchild for the first time, I saw the circle of life come sliding to completion. My grandmother, who struggled with dementia and some confusion in the last days of her life, was brightened and happy in a way that I had not seen in years. In that encounter I saw my old grandma again. Sitting with Allie Kate propped on her knee I saw the old grandma I had known. The one who had been so understanding and challenging and supportive. I saw my grandmother once again reprising the role she had so well occupied through my childhood. And oh how happy that made me!
So it may be cruel that our loved ones all have to leave us at some point, that we can never freeze the time we have together on this planet. And it may seem cruel that just as new youthful energy entered the world in Allie Kate, the last of it left my grandmother. But we can take solace in the knowledge that the lessons of our loved ones live on in us. Their quiet teaching is a flame that burns on within each of us who cared to hear their story. I only hope to be as supportive and kind to the younger generations of my family to come as my grandmother was to me. The life and best of each of my family shall live on in me as long as I live and I will pass on what I have learned to all the Allie Kates to come. So really, the circularity of life is not just something cruel but rather is a beautiful and hopeful fact of life—a chance to carry the torch and light the way, to honor those we loved, and I am forever grateful for that chance.
Thank you all for coming and God bless you,
Max Grechko
Grandson
