I began reading this book last night and am already at 70 pages into it. Today in the car I started explaining it to my mum and she said, "That feels like home." And it occurred to me that she just went through the same experience of losing her husband (my step-father) and her daughter (my oldest sister) all in one year.
In the book, the author doesn't want to throw away her husbands shoes because "he'll need shoes when he gets back." It's this unbelieving that he is dead. She is so honest with her thoughts and beliefs. When my father died just after I graduated college, I would pretend he was still alive in the house with my mum. A strange denial, a strange way to make it through the day.
Today I had lunch with my nana (94) , my aunt (84), and my mum. My aunt was telling me all this fascinating information about how our family came from France and how we ended up the US. Then in between our genealogy, there would be a story that always involved someone dying--the little girl who didn't want to cross the river, so they gave her an apple and when the boat capsized they found her drowned still clutching the apple. Sometimes, more than one person dying--three men who knocked on the door at night and a great great grandmother holding a musket out the door and killing them all. And tragedies. Tragic lives. And it occurred to me as another death was placed between the turkey wraps and the potato salad, that these are my family's favorite stories--what went wrong, who died, who lived a hard life.
And all my life I was told of the details--the brother swallowing a balloon, the father's heart attack, the young artist drawing a picture entitled "My Grave" and dying two weeks later in a freak accident. And it helped me today understand where my fear has grown from, why I'm fascinated with cemeteries, why I obsess about people dying, with how we leave this place, because I want to know the histories of the names in the headstones, the why & the how. Tell me, so I can make sure we're not there, we're not holding the apple in the river, we're nowhere near the front door.
