When it's time, it's time

As strange as it sounds, I thought of my late grandmother while I was watching and live streaming the demolition of the former First Baptist Church in Grundy Center on Monday afternoon.
           
Geraldine Heller lived to be 89 before she passed away in 2011, but anyone who knew her, including her three daughters (one of whom is my mother) would tell you that the last few years were painful, to say the least. You see, like Ronald Reagan, Norman Rockwell, Glenn Campbell and millions of other Americans, Grandma Gerry had Alzheimer’s disease.
           
What started as basic forgetfulness deteriorated into not recognizing her own grandchildren and barely being able to remember her daughters. Although her epitaph will always read 2011, the downward spiral had commenced years before. It was hard to watch as her limitations forced her to leave her home on the hill in Duluth, where I spent all of my holidays as a child, and I saw Grandma as a shell of her former self, barely living but holding on for better or worse.
           
Then one day, it finally happened. It was still sad, undoubtedly, but it was expected. No one was blindsided, and we didn’t go into fits of hysteria as a family. Because I was a college student without a car, I boarded a Megabus from Iowa City to Des Moines, met my sister in Ames and took the long drive up Highway 35 to the North Country to lay her to rest. It was emotional, sure, but we all knew it was time. We couldn’t do anything about Grandma’s condition, and she finally went to a better place.
           
Though I never had any personal connection to the old church (I’ve only lived in Grundy County since 2013, and it’s been an eyesore the entire time I’ve been here), I talked to a few people who did on Monday afternoon. Some weren’t fully ready to accept the building's fate, but most everyone had made peace with it. Unless an uber-wealthy philanthropist came along and saved it out of the goodness of his or her heart, there was no salvaging it.
 
There simply wasn’t the money, the time or the public desire to restore the church into something positive for the residents of Grundy Center. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however: as Steve King put it in a recent interview with me, “people live and die in every community,” and the same goes for buildings. One is built, and another is destroyed. An empty lot brings a new opportunity for an ambitious developer or businessperson, or, as one of the guys in a lawn chair suggested, it leaves an open space for a parking lot. Different people have different dreams.
           
From everyone I talked to, the structure’s best years were far behind it: it hadn’t even been open or operational since the 1970’s, and it was little more than an asbestos-ridden gathering place for rodents and small mammals who needed a place to crash for the night. But to others, it brought back memories that could never be replaced, and there was always an underlying hope that something could be done, or some Clark Kent would come along in a red cape to preserve this piece of Grundy Center lore.
           
The former church didn’t just suddenly pass this week. Those of us who live and work in this community watched it die for years, through legal battles and ownership disputes all the way to the final resolution. It was sad, sure, but we all knew this was coming, and to many, it was a long overdue conclusion to an interminable process.
 
Grundy Center will move on, and something new will move into the space. Future generations may just know it as the parking lot. But a piece of the town’s history died this week, and it’s never coming back.
 
“I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.”- William Faulkner, “As I Lay Dying”