In August, we bring a set of new full-time writers to the blog. Today, please welcome Michal Rubingh (’22), who will be writing for us on the 14th of each month. Michal graduated from Calvin in 2022 with a major in writing and a minor in global development studies. She’ll be working with a refugee resettlement organization in Hungary for the 2022-2023 year. She is always up for a spontaneous trip to the closest beach.

The baby on my plane did not want to succumb to sleep. She was concentrating her wailing efforts on her dad’s white t-shirt, which kept catching my eye as he bounced her through the aisles of the dim plane cabin. In the absence of any words she’d be able to understand, he reassured her with tight arms and long-term love. She fought him on it. She really needed the rest, but every bone in her body was restless.

A crying baby on a plane really heightens the doomsday feeling one might already have from surgical masks and cramped foot space. One might also have stayed up packing the whole night before her flight, started her period, and spent the last four months building up an addiction to Hungarian coffee. When three internal schedules—circadian, menstrual, performance-enhancing—are askew, one can really understand where the baby’s coming from. But grown women usually don’t wail on an eight-hour flight over the Atlantic.

The drive from New Jersey to Michigan takes twelve hours—ten and a half if my mom is driving, forteen if there’s a snowstorm. While we still lived in New Jersey, we would visit my Michigan grandparents a few times a year. There’s nothing like stale, weird car smells to make a family of four restless. Pennsylvania’s public rest-stop soap smelled like those rotten-smelling pear trees. Our empty coolers smelled like food that should’ve been refrigerated a while ago. There were even a few years when we brought our guinea pigs, cage and all, in the back of the van. By the time we got into Michigan, our sinuses were ready for open windows. We would call my grandparents when we were thirty minutes out. No matter how late it was, they always stayed awake to make us a pot of spaghetti and stand in the driveway when we arrived. My grandpa even spun a ten minute bedtime story out of his eighty-year-old brain because he had promised.

This Christmas I was coming home to Michigan again, this time to one grandparent instead of two. My grandpa was fighting through his final days of “terminal restlessness”: difficulty sleeping, eating, and getting comfortable in any position. My parents took turns staying awake with him night after night, doing everything they could to soothe the restless bones in his dying body. I almost got on an earlier flight to come home. Everytime we talked on the phone, he asked me if I was in Buda or Pest and what kind of weather we were having. He asked to hear about every new city I visited. I wanted to get home in time to tell him one more story.

Last year I got to read and transcribe my grandpa’s life journal, spanning from 1955–2014. He was around my age in his first entry. He was showing signs of Alzheimer’s in his last. I had always felt like we were good pals, but we had missed the window of time when it was possible to get close. I arrived at a place of openness and self-disclosure just as he was leaving it. The journal was the connection point. It often left me in tears, reminding me of the vibrant, stubborn, gracious person I had known all my life. In his last entry, he’s fighting the decision to move into assisted living with a lot of exclamation points. Capitulation was always something he resisted. Capitulation to comfort, to an easy theology, to apathy. Until the end, he was unwilling to succumb.

After I landed in Grand Rapids, my parents drove me to the Samaritas assisted living home where my grandpa was. He was in the same spot on his couch where I had left him. I pulled down my double face masks to show him my two-day-old nose ring, which he thought was “terrific!” I held his hand and told him a few short stories from my semester in Europe. Then I went home and slept incredibly well. My grandpa died the next morning.

People kept telling me he was waiting until I got home. I have a hard time believing there was a cosmic impetus for him to hold on until I could say goodbye, but a part of me wanted to believe it. He was restless, en route to the final, unavoidable capitulation. But he stuck around for one more homecoming (whether he meant to or not). Staying awake was a habit as ingrained in him as singing loudly during his morning ablutions. The part of him that still knew he was a grandparent knew that he was supposed to stay awake, make a pot of spaghetti, craft an elaborate bedtime story, and stand in the driveway when the headlights rolled into view. He got at least one. I can remember the rest.

Michal Rubingh

Michal graduated from Calvin in 2022 with a major in writing and a minor in global development studies. She’ll be working with a refugee resettlement organization in Hungary for the 2022-2023 year. She is always up for a spontaneous trip to the closest beach.