Matters of Life and Death

By Lyman Hafen

Illustrations courtesy of Roland Lee

I was seven years old when I first came to terms with mortality. I still remember the moment my parents told me my grandfather had died. It jolted my little-boy heart. I don’t know if I cried, but I know my mom was crying, and I felt a sudden and deep sense of loss.

My mother’s parents lived all the way across the canyons of the Colorado Plateau in San Juan County. We visited there twice a year, making the long white journey across the snowcrusted desert at Christmastime and the even longer dusty red journey through the wavering hot air of summer. We would leave St. George before daylight in our fifties Ford Sedan and pull into the small town of Blanding well after dark, having crossed during that forever-day some of the most exalted landscape on earth. The windows in the high gables of grandma’s house glowed golden in the evening. Grandma and grandpa always shuffled out into the darkness to greet us.

I remember their warm hugs before I went to bed. And the next morning, I especially remember how grandpa, who was already suffering from the ill health that would take his life, would beckon me into the living room where he was lying on the couch. He would sit up, take me in his arms, and groan as he lifted me onto his knobby knees and bounce me as if I were riding a galloping horse. Then, in a high-pitched sing-song voice, he would recite nursery rhymes, substituting my name in place of the traditional names in the rhymes.

I have precious few memories of my grandfather Joseph Edward Nielson. The ones still filed in the recesses of my mind are treasures. He and grandma came to visit us in St. George once. He was ill then and spent most of the time on our couch in the living room. I remember sitting nearby on the floor as we watched one of the first manned space launches on the grainy, flickering black and white screen of our television set. I was restless because it took forever for those Mercury rockets to launch, but grandpa was enthralled by every moment, every image, every spoken word leading up to the final countdown. It would be years before I realized how significant it was to watch a rocket carrying an astronaut into space while sitting next to my grandfather, who grew up on horseback in the pioneer village of Bluff, Utah, and traveled by horse and wagon until well after he had grown and married and begun his family.

I remember standing next to grandpa on the magnificent silver span of the new Glen Canyon Bridge, five hundred feet above the rolling water of the Colorado River, and not believing him when he told me those little figures down there, no bigger in my eyes than the plastic army men in my toy box at home, were actually grown men working on a dam that would eventually stand as tall as the canyon.

It would be a long time before I realized that my grandpa, as a young man, was one of the early cattle ranchers on Elk Mountain. Not long after he died, my uncle took me, along with all my cousins, to the old cabin at Peavine under the Bears Ears. We rode in the back of a cattle truck and made the full circle, coming home down the steep, switch-backed dugway and across the old winter range beneath Comb Ridge.

I wish I could have known grandpa better—wish I’d had the chance to talk to him in my adult years when I knew what questions to ask. But I was still a little boy on the day the news arrived that he’d died. And the next day, we were on that long drive across the Colorado Plateau, through Zion Canyon and down to Kanab and then clear on down into Arizona and back up again into Utah and through the enchanted slickrock kingdom of Monument Valley and across the San Juan and up onto White Mesa and finally into Blanding where my grandfather’s tired and worn-out body lay in state.

What I remember most about seeing him lying there in the casket in grandma’s living room was the perfect stillness of his countenance and how, regardless of my innocent attempts to do it for him, he did not breathe. Then it hit me. What hit me caused me to stop breathing, and it was when I finally took another breath that the concept of mortality—the state my grandfather was in and the state I was in—became actual for me. I am forever grateful to my parents for not depriving me of that moment.

I remember asking my parents where grandpa was. They told me he had gone to a beautiful place… the most beautiful place I could imagine. On the way home to St. George, we drove through Zion Canyon. I remember thinking how beautiful it was, and ever since, I’ve always thought of grandpa when I look up at those magnificent towers of stone.

THE WAY TO ANGELS LANDING

HAFEN • LEE

TONAQUINT PRESS

Written By LYMAN HAFEN Illustrated by ROLAND LEE Note: Lyman Hafen’s new children’s book, “The Way to Angels Landing,” is illustrated by the artist Roland Lee and will be available in late September. The story is based on memories shared in this article. Look for it at local stores or at LymanHafen.com.

About the Author

Lyman is the author of a dozen books intent on connecting landscape and story in the American Southwest. He is executive director of the Zion National Park Forever Project, and is past president of the national Public Lands Alliance. He’s been writing and publishing for more than 35 years, with several hundred magazine articles in publications ranging from Western Horseman to Northern Lights, and was the founding editor of St. George Magazine in 1983. He’s been recognized on several occasions with literary awards from the Utah Arts Council, and won the Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. He lives in Santa Clara, Utah, with his wife Debbie, and together they have 6 children and 18 grandchildren.