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That Good Night

by Francesco Rahe

This is how the old pass.

Like fog on a sunny summer day. Like a gray cirrus cloud fading before the pearly moon. Like a brush of cool wind on a starry night. Like a snowflake melting upon a windowpane.

They pass in the night, silent, with a single peaceful breath. They pass in hospital beds, amid beeping machines, with a rattle of oxygen shaking free from their chests. They pass with families around them, with aged spouses clasping their hands, or they pass alone, with no one at all. They pass and they enter the shadowlands and no matter who is with them when they pass, this final step they take alone. They enter the shadowlands alone, they stride its craggy shore, they sail their coracles past the moonlit sky, and they do not return.

This is how the old pass.

This is how I wanted my grandmother to pass: on a summer day, with buttery sunshine stroking the green hills. On a red checkered blanket with a bowl of strawberries glimmering nearby. Warmth on her face and springy grass beneath her hands and a light, playful wind rustling her hair. Her husband’s voice in the distance, murmuring about good weather for kite-flying. Her son’s voice saying they should visit the beach next week. My voice somewhere near, too.

This is how my grandmother passed: on a cold, lonely December night, with snow pattering on the hillside by her house. On a single solitary bed smelling of dust. The broken heater buzzing by her face and the alarm clock glinting a menacing red and the scratchy blankets clawing up her arms. Her husband’s ragged breaths sounding nearby, tangled up in a nightmare. My voice nowhere near at all—far away because I was far away. Because I had not called her that evening like I was supposed to. I was supposed to call her the evening before she died and I didn’t. Why didn’t I call her?

This is how my grandmother passed. Solitary. Unobserved. My grandfather finding her corpse still and cold in the morning, her soul already departed for the shadowlands. She passed alone and she passed unnoticed and now she is gone and she will never, ever come back.

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I’m not a good grandchild, to be clear.

I missed that call with my grandmother because of a party at university. Not even a good party: just a bunch of bored second years drinking beer in a dark room, spouting lines robbed from our Shadowland Studies professors in an effort to look clever. I knew I had to call her, but I figured postponing it wouldn’t hurt. I postponed calls a lot.

She was a good grandmother, though. She and my grandfather lived in a little white house in the ruin-studded hinterlands: one of those solitary, past-soaked places where the boundary between life and the shadowlands is fluid. Visiting on summer nights, I sometimes glimpsed ghosts on far hillsides, glimmering a luminous blue; they slipped out of the old white dome in the woods, which she’d told me used to be an ancient temple. That dome was a portal. If you leaned deep into it, you could almost hear the lapping of the waves, carrying those souls ready to leave the shadowlands on to their final destination. Heaven or Nirvana or oblivion—whatever you believe in. My father always said (usually with a disgusted shiver) that only a fool would choose to live in such a ghost-soaked region; if so, my grandparents were such brave fools.

We visited them every summer, my parents and I. My father would sit in the living room, making noise about his latest article while my grandfather, who hadn’t gone to college, grunted. I lingered in the kitchen, where my grandmother’s hands dug deep into bread dough. She kneaded and yanked, pushed and pulled, stretched that dough with all the strength in her little, bird-like body. She’d catch me looking and flash me a smile.

“You goose,” she said (she liked that word). “Don’t get hungry yet! You’ve got a few hours yet before it’ll be ready.”

And then, in a few hours, it was indeed ready. Hot bread, fresh from the oven. I’d slather it in honey and butter, grinning at her, maybe saying thanks if I remembered. I didn’t always remember. She’d lean back against the oven, arms crossed, nodding with pride.

“Best wheat bread in the whole hinterlands,” she’d say.

“You know, a machine would be faster,” my dad said once.

I might have been fifteen at the time, an angsty adolescent slouching everywhere in a black hoodie. Even so, I flared up at him for that. I understood the truth: grandma’s bread meant everything.

For years, she’d bake that bread for me. She baked it despite osteoporosis, despite the chronic burning pain which wreaked havoc on her arms and legs and must have made kneading an agony. She baked it with a smile. She baked it until the last two years, when the bed claimed her and she couldn’t conceal the black moods of melancholy which so often overcame her. But until then, for me, she baked bread.

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My mother told me not to come to the funeral.

“You have exams,” she said. “Classes. Your grandma would want you to succeed.”

“Is it really my exams,” I said, “or is it Dad?”

My mother’s breath crackled on the other side of the phone.

“He loves you,” she said at last. “It’s just… this is a hard time for him.”

I could have said a lot of things to that. It had been a hard time six months ago, when he’d snapped at me over dinner for my choice of study. It had been a hard time a year ago, when he’d shouted at me for letting my little brothers see my textbooks. And it had been a hard time a year and a half ago, when he’d glowered all through my high school graduation. It was always a hard time for him.

“I got it,” I said instead—and what else was I supposed to say? His mother had just died; how would it make things any better for me to force myself into things?

“It wasn’t easy for him growing up, you know,” Mother said.

I hung up.

For half an hour, I sat in my room alone, the white walls and the whispers of old quarrels uniting to clamp shut around me like teeth. What was so wrong with studying the shadowlands? Why couldn’t he show the slightest appreciation for my studies… the languages I’d learned, the religious texts I’d pored through, even the times (brief, exhilarating times, in a class group) I’d crawled through portals to the other side? But all of this was merely a distraction, a re-hash of old anger I’d long since forgotten. The real truth pierced through me like a needle: I hadn’t called my grandma the night before she died. And now I was missing her funeral.

I could have pretended nothing had happened; everyone’s grandparents died and everyone dealt with it. They moved on. Why should I make a big deal out of my particular loss?

Perhaps I could have done that, if I had been someone else, somewhere else. But I was me, a researcher perplexed with the afterlife. I had a motive, the sour-milk smell of my own guilt goading me like a whip. Finally, my location was ripe for trouble. This gives me no absolution… merely an explanation.

The boundary between life and the shadowlands is fluid in many places; universities, especially old ones like mine, have their own ghosts. And ghosts, restless souls unwilling to set sail from the shadowlands’ shores, are drawn to the scent of death. They slip out of ivy-covered alcoves and Gothic gargoyles. They blink in and out like lighthouses on the main quad at night. They fix their glowing eyes upon you. Where the boundary is fluid, where ghosts appear, a portal must be close, too—like the temple by my grandma’s house. A portal through which you can glimpse the shores to the shadowlands. A portal through which, maybe, you can climb through.

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My grandmother was what they call a free spirit.

She smoked marijuana as a college student; she wrote a short story about it, which I found in my father’s cabinet as a teenager. She’d grown up in a strict Irish Catholic family and the weed, along with the degree from Cornell in Shadowland Studies and the choice to set up a farm with her giant, gentle husband in the hinterlands, were a kind of rebellion against her family’s norms.

She and my grandfather shared a gorgeous gossamer dream about that farm—fields of corn far as the eye can see, strawberries red and plump in the sunshine, maybe a few cows grazing contented in verdant pastures. They wanted that farm to last for generations; they pictured themselves and their kin as stewards of the soil. Stewards, perhaps, of the saddened souls which roamed that land.

Everyone and everything existed miles and miles away. My grandparents spent their married life alone together in as rural a place as rural can get. A place so far from the city lights that when you gazed up on a cloudless night, the stars blazed out like a tapestry of torches before you. An ideal location, this place, to interact with the dead… to build new-age altars in the hill tops and leave fresh bread by the portal to the underworld. To close your eyes and stand in the velvety night and wait, wait, for the cool-water fluidity which suggests the presence of a being long-past. A place rich in history and dreams, my grandparents’ farm… but not a place rich in the living.

A farm which lasts for generations depends on successful planting and the striving of children. The planting struggled in the rocky, half-frozen hinterland fields. There were to be no corn fields, no strawberries, and at last, no cows. The souls of the dead could not till their barren fields, and my grandparents’ only child, my father, strived for other things.

The only childhood photo I’ve seen of him depicts a gangly, bespectacled youth, head ducked away from the camera. Away from my beaming grandmother. He never took to weeding fields or furnishing makeshift altars; he preferred books to branches and organized religion to outlandish rituals.

The stars were not enough for him; he needed the busy blaze of city lights, the company of quick-minded peers. He wanted something, anything, other than the endless expeditions into the murky darkness: the terrible nights I’d only heard hinted about, when my intrepid grandmother dragged him along to risky experimental trips to the shadowlands. My father wanted to escape. He taught himself Ancient Greek, got a full scholarship to an Ivy, converted to Catholicism, and didn’t look back.

The dream of the farm aged and passed as the old pass—fading out, until it became an ethereal wisp, then nothing at all. My grandparents never even spoke of it to me; I only heard of it second-hand from my father. He was bitter about the pressure they’d put him under, the sense he’d always had that they didn’t want him to live the life he’d chosen.

I believe my grandparents sensed my father’s life was for me, too. However much I loved the quiet timelessness of their house and the dusty smell of history, I always was drawn in the end, like a moth to a candle, to the excitement of the world. To libraries and research institutions and the distanced analysis of eerie data collected by adventurers. I always wanted to leave them; even when with them, I was almost always absent.

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You need memories to enter the shadowlands.

You also need courage, and a closeness to death: to be someone lingering in the twilight, half-departed from the world already.

To find a particular dead soul within the shadowlands, you need even more than that. You need something of theirs they care for, something soaked through with their striving. You need something they can consume, imbibe, make part of them. Something which can drag them into the painful wringing of corporeality. You are not just trying to catch a ghost-blue glimmer of them, after all… if you have gone so far as to dive into the shadowlands to find them, you want a conversation at least. In my case, a chance to apologize. A chance to atone. A chance to grant my grandmother the sort of peaceful passing she deserved.

I needed my grandmother’s bread.

I didn’t have the recipe. I spent two days searching the internet. Another day combing through my inbox, examining every message from my mother, from my grandfather, from my grandmother… far too many messages I’d received but not responded to. The bread recipe didn’t surface anywhere. On the fourth day, the day before my grandmother’s funeral, I called my father.

“The tuition payment should have already gone through,” he said on the other side of the phone.

“I’m not, uh, calling about that,” I said.

A pause, in which I waited for him to snap at me or hang up.

“How are your classes going?” he asked instead.

For the next ten minutes, I told him all about my gen-ed classes. About the hyperactive young professor who taught my English class and the old, foul-mouthed Scot who taught my Physics class. About my Kant-quoting classmate who always wore a suit and my solitaire-expert pupil who invariably showed up fifteen minutes late in pajamas. About everything and nothing, all the little details safe enough to communicate… and Dad listened. He listened and he asked questions and in the upward tilt of his voice, I could almost see his smile. At last, on the other side of the phone, he sighed.

“Well… it’s getting close to dinner time. Your mother is a bit busy; I’d better get off. But thank you for calling.”

“Dad!”

A pause.

“A-are you alright?” I asked.

I swallowed in the crackly silence, waiting for the abruptness of anger.

“Don’t worry,” he said instead. “Just… focus on your classes. The good ones.”

He couldn’t even give me a proper answer; he couldn’t even talk to me without criticizing my major choice. That flash of anger turned inward after an instant, though. I gripped my phone till the edges dug into my hand like a hot coal. I’d messed up enough; I couldn’t delay any further.

“Dad, can you email me grandma’s recipe?” I asked. “I just… I need it. To help me get over tomorrow. You know, to focus on my studies?”

He drew in a ragged breath: fragile, close to breaking. I took the guilt from that breath and fed it into my grandmother’s funeral pyre. The only thing which mattered here was whether he’d think fast enough. Whether he’d figure out what I wanted to do.

“Fine,” he said, so swift I knew he wanted to move on.

Then he hung up on me.

That night, I began. Flour and water, sugar and salt. Yeast and my grandmother’s secret ingredients. Kneading by hand in the dorm kitchen till my back ached. The clock slipping on, on, on… the dough rising, the oven blinking. Bread. The bread had finished and the morning of my grandma’s funeral had begun.

I skipped my philosophy class the day of my grandma’s funeral. I ignored the classics journal meeting and the debate club. I set aside readings, information slipping through my fingers like sand, and let my history assignment wink out on my canvas page, undone. Friends texted me and I didn’t text back. My dad texted me and I didn’t even read it. I followed my memories from class expeditions and exhausted observations of the ghosts at night on the quad… I found the portal.

It lay behind the abandoned chapel on the east side of campus. A little pool, surrounded by gray stones, which glowed a numinous white at night. I knelt before it, clutched the bread to my chest, forgot every warning I’d ever heard about visiting that other realm, and dove inside.

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By the time I graduated high school, my grandmother was nearing the end. She used to visit my family in the city every year. My high school graduation was the last time she came.

She was sick and silent the whole visit, face slick with sweat. My grandfather rubbed her back and sat by her and brought her plates with olives on them. Broad shoulders hunched and bearded face crinkled in a sad smile, he reminded me of an aged bear. He didn’t have her fine education or wealthy family; he’d come from portal-guide stock, a carpenter in an age of metal and factories. I remember him hefting saws in the work shed, grinding at soft maple or hard oak. When my father became Catholic, my grandmother raged. My grandfather whittled him a little olive-wood crucifix that still hangs in his room.

Towards the end of my graduation ceremony, the headmaster announced my national award-winning essay on Shadowland Studies to the crowd. I’d spent all senior year slaving away at it, teaching myself Latin and combing through gravestone inscriptions; I’d never been so proud before. In the audience, my father scowled. He muttered something to my mother, something sharp and audible even through the crowd. Something I’d rather not remember. At the reception afterwards, I lurked by the snack table and wondered if it was selfish not to change my course of study—if it hurt him so much for me to be me, then why couldn’t I just become someone else?

“Sounds like you wrote a good essay,” my grandmother said, leaning on her cane at the doorway to the back room.

Her voice was a ragged rasp and her knuckles gripped white on the cane’s top, but she smiled at me anyway: the teeth-gritted smile of the old. Old age ain’t for sissies, she used to say a lot.

I never told her about my later research, about the time I cited one of her discoveries in a paper. I never saw her again after that. Our conversations on the phone were sparse; she often mixed me up with my father. Once, midway through my first year of college, she began apologizing to me, saying she loved me even if I went to that church, even if… My grandfather took the phone and returned me to the easier topic of my classes and his carpentry—the small talk of two people who know the third in the room is slipping away.

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The shadowlands are all places and no places. There, location and person are mingled; your chosen item carries you to the part of the beach where your loved one once was, and you wait there for them. Bone white sand, a shifting sky above, and obsidian black waves as far as the eye can see. You sit on the sand and you think about death and you wait. For hours which seem like years, you wait.

She’d gone already. I should have known she’d left. She hadn’t stayed on the beach to ponder anything; she hadn’t tried, like the ghosts, to struggle back. She’d sailed her coracle over the sea and she hadn’t thought to return. That’s more common than you’d think—despite what we say, most times it is the living who haunt the dead. Not the other way around. I waited for her anyway.

Others had waited too. They’d left marks on the sand, footsteps on the shore, little items strewn by the waterline. A small aspen dove. A torn page from a Sylvia Plath book. A flower. But now I alone was left, I and my bread… without the soul I’d baked it for.

I waited all night, till my blood slowed in my veins and the world felt translucent. My professor emailed me about my missing assignment and my friends texted me and I waited and I waited. My dad called once, twice, thrice; he’d figured out my decision, but it didn’t even matter anymore. I left him on voice mail, unheard. What could he say to me, except what I already knew? That I’d failed him and grandma, both at once, and now, for one of those failures, no remedy remained? I waited.

I waited and she didn’t come. I couldn’t apologize to her, I couldn’t call her again, because she was gone. I couldn’t ask her if she’d gotten the chance to apologize to my father. I couldn’t tell her I loved her. I couldn’t thank her for saying, in as few words as she had, that it was okay for me to study what I wanted. That she loved me anyway.

I waited and waited and at last, at the crack of midnight, I went to those waves and I dove in.

The water there is cold, so cold it claws into your bones. Your breath leaves you and you feel the weight of souls around you. The living are not meant to swim in the ocean of the shadowlands and you know that. You know that and you swim anyway. You don’t care anymore.

Life is noise and blather and nothing; in death lie all the realities life hid. The words you never said, the feelings you were too stupid to bring to the surface… Death lies past the ocean of the shadowlands, and if you can swim far enough, fast enough, maybe you’ll reach it and you’ll be able to say all the words it’s too late to let out.

“I love you, grandma. I love you and I’m sorry and I meant to call you, I did. I wish I had called you. I wish so much that I had.”

I swam and I swam and I swam and I tried to get away. I tried so hard and for a moment, I thought I’d succeeded. The bread flew from my hand into the crushing water and where the waves tore it, I thought I glimpsed the water part. Far past the gray veil of the water parting, I thought I saw a tall woman smiling. Her hands were dark with soil. She wasn’t smiling at me; she was smiling at something else. Someone else. She’d found a place far away and I wasn’t in it. And I wanted her to come back, with a selfishness and a need harsher than love. I wanted her to come back so I could say I was sorry, so she could say, all over again, that she loved me—

Someone caught me.

Warmth, the bitter scorching warmth of life. They dragged me back to shore and into their arms. Strong, soft arms around me and the press of a cross against my forehead and my father’s sobs over me.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay. I know, I know, but she’s gone… and she forgives us and we have to forgive her.”

We hugged each other on that beach, my father and I, and we cried together.

“I love you,” he said. “I love you, and I want you to be happy. To study whatever you want. Please stay here with me.”

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Host Commentary

In my day job, I see a LOT of students. Some of them breeze through their studies, but many don’t, and I really don’t think it’s as easy as it used to be. There’s the worry of debt, of finding a job, finding friends, whether you belong or not. COVID, and the interruptions to schooling, have added extra pressures – there’s a palpable sense of exhaustion in graduating students. On top of that, many struggle with the weight of expectations on them – whether their own or their family’s – while others have to forge their independence in isolation, due to distance or estrangement.

This story really resonated with me, in how it showed that liminality between expectations and independence, freedom and family ties, desire to do what’s right for us and a desire to please those we love most. It also shows that even where the gap between parent and child grows large, if anything can bridge it, it’s love.

The closing paragraphs here are beautiful – our paths may not lead us where our families want or expect, but a good parent will know when to let go, and let us find our own way. We, in turn, will one day have to face the world with only our memories of them. I hope this story inspires you to strive for your own goals, to be your own person, and that your own support network is there for you when you need them the most.