Death surrounds me.
It always has.
The first death I remember was my mother‘s father who died at 55, when I was three-and-a-half, after a six-week illness – cancer, discovered late.
Five years later my dad‘s father died at 60, after an even shorter illness.
Four years after that, my mother’s mother died, at 62. I was twelve. She had been sick with cancer off and on for several years. So her death was a shadow over fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh grades.
In the years between twelve and nineteen several of my grandparents’ siblings with whom I was close died. One after cancer, one after leukemia, one of Alzheimer’s.
And then, of course, at age nineteen my mother died.
That’s a lot of death for a young person, and it certainly shaped my experience of life. My child, who is now twenty-one has been to three funerals. At age one her mother’s grandmother died. Our child never knew her, and has no memory of that. At age six or seven we went to the funeral – or rather, the wake – of the father of a good friend of mine. And around that same time we went to the funeral of the husband of a childhood friend of mine, the first premature death our family faced. But it was not a close friend, not someone our child really knew or mourned.
So, now, at age twenty-one, the first real funeral hasn’t yet happened. But death is knocking at our familial door. My wife has step-siblings. Their father – the ex-husband of T’s stepmother – just died. Tomorrow we’ll be at his funeral. Our kid won’t be. This is someone she never met, she didn’t know.
But death nears.
We can smell it now.
Our kid has six living grandparents, five of whom are over the age of eighty-five, and a plethora of great aunts and uncles.
I have the sense it might be time to go suit shopping….