I visited my Grandpa Rainey—my dad’s father—in the hospital the other day and he asked me if I like coffee. “Yes, the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is to go start the coffee,” I told him.
“That’s how I knew she wasn’t going to make it,” he had told me in March when I was home for my Grandma Rainey’s funeral. “She stopped drinking coffee.”
If there is any metaphor for life that both sides of my family shared, it is coffee. As long as we are drinking coffee, we are alive. We have a reason to get up in the morning, to brew a pot, to hear the coffee moan and travail until the dripping stops and the coffee pots rests, her work done for another day. We pour a cup, put in our cream and sugar, grab a Bible or newspaper, and come alive for a new day. We start the day this way during the deep chill of a winter morning or on dewy spring days just after dawn. When we drink coffee, we are alive.
When I was growing up, I was not as close to my dad’s family because my parents divorced, but I have since found out that both sides of the family were coffee drinkers. I learned early on at our house that there was an unofficial meeting every morning where we would all—my mother, grandparents, and I— quietly come to the table. No one told us we had to; we just all showed up. There, we would divide the newspaper—my grandma always got the front page first and I got the Sports section—and drank our coffee. Together, but mostly in silence. This was our Communion, our sacred gathering to start each day.
The grandparents who raised me and my mother are no longer alive, but I still have the faded set of beige coffee cups with small burnt orange leaves that we used during those sacred mornings. Every now and then, I will use one of those cups and remember those days.