It is somewhere in one of these random recollections that my momma reaches down and lifts me into her arms. It is a sunny day with no season in a room with no location filled with flowers. The smell of roses is thick. I sit in my momma’s arms with tiny hands clutching her neck, and we stare into a long, carved box lined in a shiny material whose color I cannot picture. Inside the box is Mrs. Nelle who goes to my church, who is the mother of my momma’s best friend, and who lets me come over on hot days and swim in her pool.
“Isn’t she pretty?” Momma whispers in my ear. I reach out and touch her hand and understand that she’s not in there.
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I am in school, but I don’t know which grade. My brother, my cousin, Kathryn, and I are playing on the staircase of my grandmother’s church. Kathryn is a very pretty brunette with a severe under bite. Later, she would have it fixed and become one of the most gorgeous girls I’ve ever seen. We laugh and run while the sun slants through the large windows dappling the floor and catching the dust. For some reason which isn’t important, I decide to walk back to my grandmother’s house, about three blocks.
As I approach the house, I see Uncle Buddy, my grandmother’s brother and Kathryn’s grandfather, walk up my grandmother’s front steps and ring the doorbell. I run to catch up, and as I reach the front walk, he falls.
He falls hard and fast. I see his head collide with the black metal mailbox bolted to the clapboard just right of the door. The box has two curved rungs, curling upward from the bottom to hold letters for the postman to pick up. As the left rung makes contact, it bends until it points straight down, and he continues falling until he hits the bricks sprawling in an awkward position.
My grandmother opens the door and immediately drops to her knees, cradling his face in her hands. I run, beating the pavement with my sneakers, back to the church. Kathryn and my brother don’t know that I ever left. Her grandfather is dead. I sit in the tree house on the playground and listen to the sirens. I hear Nathan and Kathryn wondering where the sirens are going. Kathryn’s father comes down the long stairs onto the playground, wiping his eyes. She runs to him, and he scoops her up, whispering something in her ear. She screams.
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At Uncle Buddy’s funeral, all the brothers and sisters sit together on three small pews. His oxygen tank slowly following him on its small wheels, led by his daughter and leaning heavily and laboriously on his walker, Uncle Doc takes his seat.
“They say he won’t be with us much longer,” someone behind me remarks. Within the month, I am back on the pew, holding my mother’s hand, the smell of roses wafting sickeningly through the air.
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My Aunt Leila, my grandmother’s sister, and her husband Martin are a crotchety old couple. They fight like cats, but it is never violent. Rather, there squabbles are endearing. They used to run a nursery, and still have a small greenhouse in their backyard. They are always bringing people exotic fruits or vegetables grown in the climate controlled environment.
Aunt Leila has been sick for a long time. The pancreatic cancer which I was told took her sister, Dorothy, is now eating slowly away at her. At the funeral home, the weight loss has made her look frail and small inside her coffin. The cancer did not leave much behind to say goodbye to.
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Aunt Lucy is the sweetest woman I’ve ever met. My grandmother’s sister-in-law, she lives out on Judge Brown Road in a little green house with a long bed of day lilies running from the front door about forty feet all the way to the road. There are deep reds, bright oranges, dusty yellows speckled with brown, and a glorious plum color. Extremely late one morning, Janice, her daughter, finds her still in bed, peaceful and silent. She doesn’t wake up.
We all stand in the congregation of Fairfax Baptist singing a hymn, but I don’t remember which one. My tears splash the pages, darkening the notes.
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Aunt Helen, my grandfather’s sister, has been diagnosed with cancer. She is the only twin we’ve ever had in the family, but she lost her sister when they were in their twenties. When Aunt Helen passes away, she’s in her seventies and will see her sister again after fifty years.
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I am in the sixth grade and my grandfather has begun to decline. The stroke which forced him into early retirement and the mild heart attack which convinced them to put in a pacemaker have finally taken their toll. He has pneumonia and can’t shake it; a form of cancer is beginning to spread.
My bedroom is off the living room, and I’m awakened to the sounds of my mother crying. I walk into the living room and she’s sitting in the recliner with the telephone in her lap. He’s gone.
“This one is lovely,” my mother sighs, tired and numb, clutching the side of a light wooden coffin made of pecan. “We’ll have a thirty minute viewing for immediate family only.” A man scribbles on a notepad as my mother speaks. “Then, close the casket and open the doors to distant family and friends. Please, send all the flowers straight to the cemetery. Only bring the two large vases ordered by the family to the church; no spray on the coffin. Mother would like to use the American flag from when Daddy served in World War II. I’ll send my brother-in-law back with the flag and his suit.”
The parlor is full. Granddaddy was so kind; everyone loved him. I sit on the stairs, tucked away into the shadow at the top, crying.
My teacher comes outside and crouches down to where I’m sitting on the stoop. Her dark bob, streaked with gray, frames her thin face. Her eyes are blue and warm.
“I’m so sorry, Aaron,” she says, taking my hand.
“Thank you,” I mumble. I don’t know what else to say.
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During the first week of seventh grade, my English teacher has us each draw a timeline illustrating our lives. Mine is lined from left to right with little tombstones.
“Thank God I’m not in your family,” Tabitha exclaims over my shoulder. “You’re like the Angel of Death.” Mrs. Leonard tells us we’ll be hanging our timelines on the wall. I hide mine in my desk.
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I’m fourteen and my grandmother has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the same illness that took two of her sisters. She opts not to have the surgery. It can be very risky for someone of her age, and she’s lived without her husband for two years; she’s ready. We wait.
As the months pass, she starts to decline. She becomes weaker and weaker. Her pancreas can no longer operate at the rate it needs to due to the cancer that is consuming it. The bile begins to back up; her face turns yellow with jaundice.
Her niece, a gastroenterologist, believes her suffering can be relieved somewhat. She puts in a small drainage stint and it does wonders. Her face regains its natural color, some of her energy returns, and for a month or more she seems like her old self again. Over night, it seems, Hospice comes with morphine, oxygen tanks, and an adjustable bed.
My mother and I move in to my grandmother’s house. We move my grandmother into the front bedroom, Momma sleeps in my grandmother’s bedroom, and I take the basement room. In the coming months, I fall into a routine. I go to school and then come home and sit with my grandmother. The leaves start to turn through the window, and I hold her hand. I watch the light go from the far corner of the North window to the sill of West. Silence blankets the room interrupted only by a slight tick of the clock on the mantel and my grandmother’s occasional ragged breathing. Every day becomes like every other day. All actions become mechanical.
Finally, my mother’s sister comes. Better late than never, I suppose, but I still bear my anger toward her. I sit in the deep dark, hating her for taking so long, hating her children for not coming at all, hating my brother for thinking that he is too busy during his freshman year of college to come. They would come for the funeral. They would only see the beautiful part of dying. They would not push the morphine into her abused veins, praying it would relieve the pain of being eaten alive, praying she would sleep, praying she could rest. Next to my mother, my grandmother was the most important person in my life.
One night, my eyes flutter open and I know I should go upstairs. When I reach the door to the front bedroom, everyone is standing around my grandmother’s bed crying. She is speaking to them, and I sit in the overstuffed chair on the other side of the room and watch. I do not approach the bed. I will hold her hand once everyone has dozed off.
She goes in and out of consciousness for the rest of the night and next morning finally giving up the ghost somewhere close to 9 a.m. The machinery is broken; the daily mechanics which had become my life are shattered. I cannot hold back and begin to sob. I had watched death creep down the walls for months, just as the days and days I had watched the orange light go from the molding to the carpet. None of it had made the end easy.
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My sophomore year of college, I get a call from my mother. Mrs. Hattie, the woman who helped raise me, has finally passed. She was diagnosed with brain cancer the previous spring. I can’t make it to the funeral; I have class.
The city is world of eternal youth. Everyone is young and beautiful. I realize that class is a ridiculous excuse. I was not attending school in Europe; it was a four hour drive. In that four hours, however, I had left the world of small town death. Behind was a world of coffins and sickness, candles and wakes, cemeteries, hymns, hospitals, and handkerchiefs, that heavy smell of roses. In the city, death only exists in the newspaper. I do not want to go back.
I understand my cousins, my aunt, my brother. I understand them, but I do not forgive them. I sit in the dark, hating them. I sit in the dark, hating myself.
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On a late afternoon is December, I climb the hill to Chapel Hill Cemetery. The rain stopped about an hour ago, and the sunset is reflecting in each water drop, making every thing golden with light. Leaves rustle at my feet as the smell of wet earth reaches my nose. The wind blows the trees. The roses in my hand brush against one another, petals off white tipped in pink, a delicate sheer ribbon fluttering in the breeze, binding the stems together. Finally, I reach a tombstone with an open book carved into it. The page on the left reads “Hattie Murphy.” I place the roses on the stone.
“I’m here; a year late, but I made it…I’m sorry.”
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