Echoes from the Gift of Life

Part I of The Gift of Mortality

One of my first-and-favorite memories is of visiting my great-grandmother at her enormous farm, lined at the back and on one side with a great patch of woods and on the opposite side by thick, green cornstalks and facing a long, black, oft-empty road. My older brother and I played in the yard, picked blackberries and raspberries from tangled vines growing in the back, climbed into the old barn that smelled of hay and animals-no-longer-in-residence . I picked flowers for my Great-Grandma (and learned quickly they belonged planted at the mailbox); my brother and I nearly emptied her cold pantry of homemade pickled beets and jars of chicken-and-dumplings.

She didn’t seem old, then.

A few years after my grandparents — her son and daughter-in-law — died in an airplane crash while on their way to visit us, we celebrated my great-grandmother’s 99th birthday at the nursing home. The men and women there were so old, their leathery skin buckling in broad wrinkles that hung from frail, skeletal faces and limbs. There was a man, too, whose body shook; who could not hold his head up; who drooled constantly from his gaping, half-open mouth. He mumbled when he tried to speak.

And, while proud of Great-Grandma for living such a long time, she — thin and pale-skinned in her pink nightgown — and the rooms of incapacitated people frightened me far more than when she had switched me for picking her flowers.

I didn’t know how to deal with death; I barely knew what it was. I didn’t cry at her funeral, later that year; I hadn’t cried at my grandparents’, either. I observed my mother grieving at the loss of her parents and worried more for her than anything.

I was told my dead grandparents and great-grandmother were in Heaven, that they were happy. If they were happy and safe, that was alright with me.

I landed at the airport with my son a week-or-so before Christmas; I had planned the trip to visit my…

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