Grandma Died and turned into a Goose

Robert McKeon Aloe
Overthinking Life
Published in
6 min readApr 19, 2019

My grandma loved Canadian geese. She grew up mostly in Detroit, and she raised her family in Detroit and then Birmingham, Michigan. She used to save the last few pieces of bread to feed the geese, so the geese held a special place in her family’s heart. I’m pretty sure she is turned into a goose after she died, and I didn’t come to that conclusion lightly.

Great-Grandma Dies

Let’s take a step back. My grandma didn’t always like the geese. Her mother would feed the geese regularly. My great-grandmother lived in Ontario, and she would feed the geese and migrate with them to California every year. I don’t know if she drove along with them flying, but she did migrate to stay with her sons in California during the cold winter.

My great-grandmother told everyone for 30 years that she was dying and they had better come see her before she’s dead. So every summer, everyone would come out and visit her. One summer, someone asked her why she hadn’t died. She said, “It’s impolite to die when there’s company.” She promptly died that October after everyone had left.

“It’s impolite to die when there’s company”

As her casket was being lowered into the ground, a few hundred geese flew up from the river, and they went in a circle overhead, honking. After that day, my grandma figured her mother was probably a goose or at least that she should be nice to the geese.

Grandma Dies

In 1998, my grandma was diagnosed with cancer and given 6 months to live. Two years later, she finally died the week after Christmas, after everyone had gone home. She was just being polite, and she wanted to get through the 12 days of Christmas (on the 12th day of Christmas, my true love gave to me, 12 dead grandmas…). She also put her makeup on 30 minutes before she died because she always wanted to look good for special occasions.

She had a DNR, so the morgue wasn’t in a rush to come over. She had died in a pink chair in the living room, and the family of mine there didn’t want to stop watching tv. What was the difference?

My grandparents had 13 kids and adopted 1, so 14. They had 44 grandchildren, so the wake was pretty large and long. During the wake, the house was full of Irish descent Americans getting drunk and playing cards.

As for the pink chair, they just flipped the cushion. If you ever walk into a house crowded with people during a wake, always be wary of the empty chair. We played a game where whenever someone sat in the chair, we’d go over and whisper in the ear why nobody was sitting in that chair. Oh the fun we had.

She wanted to be cremated, but one of my uncle’s told us to wait to cremate her; he wanted to talk to her one last time. He talked to her for three hours. He came back to the house, and he said, “It was the best conversation I ever had with my mother; she didn’t interrupt me, not once!”

Finally, she was cremated, but my grandfather was so cheap, he didn’t get an urn. The result was grandma-in-the-box. It was a cardboard box with a hard plastic box inside and a plastic bag inside of that. We also had to make a fake grandma-in-the-box as some of our extended family had a history of stealing ashes.

Burial

Because she died in January, the ground was too cold to bury her. The plan was to make a rose garden outside of where my grandparents met and bury her in the summer.

Every summer, we used to go to Camp Dearborn, and my family had gone for 40 years. Camp Dearborn is sudo-camping. You have a tent with coats, a fridge, and a stove. We would take up two rows of tents (~20 tents), and I have fond memories of the place. What I don’t remember is ever seeing a Canadian goose there. In fact, none of my family had seen Canadian geese there in all the years they had been going.

The Saturday morning we were going to bury her, four geese start walking down our two rows of tents, honking, waking everyone up at 7am. The last place the walked past was my mom’s car at the end of the row. Grandma-in-the-box was in my mom’s car at the end of the row of tents.

The real kicker was that Canadian geese used to be in County Clare in Ireland, but they had disappeared over a hundred years ago. They suddenly returned. We suspect it was grandma going to Ireland. She always wanted to go to Europe, but when she asked her husband to go, his response was that he’s already been. He had flown B-24’s in WWII, and he didn’t want to go back. Who knows if he was being cheap or just traumatized.

Grandpa Dies

The burial went just fine, and life moved on. My grandpa died two years later in April. As a joke, when we cremated him, we also put him in a box. We also had a fake grandpa-in-a-box. We would play cards at the wake, and we put the grandpa-in-the-box right on the table. We would deal him in, and someone would play for him the same way he would play.

We buried him in June, after Camp Dearborn, just like with grandma. The morning that we were going to bury his ashes, 4 geese walk down our aisle, honking again, waking people up. The last place they past was my uncle’s car, which had grandpa-in-the-box.

Geese

Every time I see the geese and hear them honk, I wonder if that’s my grandparents. I told my oldest son that my grandma was a goose, and he got so upset. He didn’t want to be turned into a goose when he died. I don’t know if she’s really a goose, but I also don’t have evidence to the contrary.

If you like, follow me on Twitter and YouTube where I post videos espresso shots on different machines and espresso related stuff. You can also find me on LinkedIn.

Further readings of mine:

My coffee setup

The Tale of the Stolen Espresso Machine

Why Starbucks makes burnt coffee

Trent Reznor: From Idol to Human

For the Love of Paris

Going Sugar Free, Sort of

My Green Thumb

Tales from the Megabus

Double Culture Shock

--

--

Overthinking Life
Overthinking Life

Published in Overthinking Life

Thinking too much on Philosophy, Math, Science, Politics, Work, and Life

Robert McKeon Aloe
Robert McKeon Aloe

Written by Robert McKeon Aloe

I’m in love with my Wife, my Kids, Espresso, Data Science, tomatoes, cooking, engineering, talking, family, Paris, and Italy, not necessarily in that order.

No responses yet