Grandpa Didn't Want To Go To Church

Following my paternal grandmother's death after childbirth, my grandfather began moving constantly with his two young children to different places, getting new jobs and starting new projects only to leave again some time later. Sometimes they would go to a new neighbourhood or to a nearby city, but some other occasions they would move to a faraway state oftentimes to places not only remote but isolated and with barely any basic services.

At some point Grandpa remarried and had two more children, uncles P and B, who are much younger than my father and his brother. Uncle B is older than me by only three years.

After becoming an adult and starting his own family, my father sometimes would lost contact with Grandpa because they had moved to a place without telephone service. We would get a letter or a postal card letting us know of their latest whereabouts only to learn, time afterwards, that they had sold their house and moved somewhere else...again.

Eventually uncle B settled down. But now married uncle P and his family (aunt M, and cousins T and L.M), and my grandparents stayed together practicing Grandpa's nomadic lifestyle.

For the above reasons, my siblings and I didn't really have a chance to spend much time with Grandpa nor to keep much memories of him.

I don't know much about his character other than he was an adventurer and wasn't afraid to undertake any new enterprise, it didn't bother him to start again from zero.

I imagine Grandpa was religious at some point in his life, as it would be expected of a bishop's brother-in-law and of a man who had joined the Cristeros' Army.

Grandma passed away and several years later, in January 1999, Grandpa took his own life.

Given the circumstances of his death and the fact that they had to take his body to the coroner's, there was not a vigil held for Grandpa.

Uncle P decided that Grandpa's last resting place should be at the side of his late wife. There was a funeral mass after which they had to take him for burial to a cemetery in a city more than 250 km away from the place where they were living.

Shortly after his passing, my mother kept a lit candle and prayed for him. One day she had to leave the house to run some errands and, to be safe, she placed the candle on the tiled floor of the living-room away from anything that could accidentally start a fire.

When she got home and saw the candle, a silent reminder of Grandpa's tragic death, she prayed again and, to her surprise, saw the candle glide gracefully on the floor for at least two meters!

It is going to be 21 years since Grandpa died, during which I have gone to Mexico several times. I was there last month and had a good visit with uncle B and his family. We talk about many topics, at some point the conversation took us to discuss Grandpa's death and he told me something that happened to him during the funeral.

Like I mentioned before, there was no wake for Grandpa, still they had to hire the services of a funeral company and a hearse to transport the casket from the coroner's to the church and from the church to the cemetery.

When the hearse arrived to the church, uncle B, cousin T and two men from the funeral company carried the casket toward the building, but when they were crossing the threshold B felt like as if the weight the pallbearers were holding had multiplied several times making almost impossible to keep walking. His first thought was that his body/mind were reacting to the stress of his father's death and made his best to prevent his knees from buckling and kept walking into the church. Once inside, the weight of the body and the box went back to normal.

At the end of the service he wondered if this would happen again, but it didn't.

He kept the events to himself for a long time, until one day when cousin T confessed to have experienced the same thing that day at the church.

They concluded that Grandpa didn't want to go to church that day, perhaps he felt regret for having taken his life or was afraid of facing whatever was waiting for him at the other side.