A Death In The Family

They sent me the obituary of my first cousin, once removed, a member of the generation younger than I who had succumbed to cancer. I scarcely knew her but was close to two of her sisters, and was pleased that at the end she, a single woman, had her four siblings on hand to share her last days.  It made me think of the deaths in my own family, a group of people much more disparate and spread out than this crew.  Of my siblings the first to go was my little sister, at sixty five or so, of aggressive cancer which she chose not to have treated.  She lived in our home town of Iowa City, far from me in Massachusetts, and I had seen her the year before or maybe two when one of my daughters and I drove out to see family and paid her a visit.  She was a great wit, a marvelous impersonator of corn pone middle western people, or maybe later in life she had actually become one.  Those things are hard to determine.  When I knew she was dying I wrote her a letter, of farewell which was, I fear, a little stiff, and true to her no nonsense style, she never answered.  This sorrowful sibling event called for parchment and quill pens, and I was no more up for that than the florid eighteenth century remarks that came I must admit unbidden to mind.  But I did not go back to see her, to say goodbye in person, to kiss her brow, no none of those things.  Then my oldest sister, by ten years older than the sister who had died,  suffered a fall for which there was no solution than that she enter a nursing home.  It was a four hour drive from my home, who was the nearest sibling by many many miles.  So for one year I commuted weekends to her house, stayed with her obnoxious cat and went over many times to see her, and  I forced all our siblings to pay a visit or two at some time during the year.  I manufactured family feeling, said they, just like Mother.   It became clear that my sister was never coming out of a nursing since, among other things,  she had no children and her consort had died a few years back.  I told her if she remained near where she had lived I could not come to see her week after week, and she would be better off moving near me.  No, she said.  Okay.  Five years later she began to bleed internally and asked to let the bleeding continue so that she could die a gentle quiet death.  I was on my way to Florida with my husband, so with a certain amount of guilt I said goodbye.  She lingered for three weeks, but, hey, I was not going to stay on in the town-- I had no place to stay any longer--and I had told her the facts when she went in to the home.  My older brother at ninety fell down the stairs while visiting his daughter and that was that.  Two siblings ninety and ninety two are still going strong, and as the younger said the other day on the phone "I just hope I have a strong stroke soon, both us of us two sisters, we are so strong."  I don't plan to go to their death bed; one is in San Diego and the other in North Carolina.  The former I visited two years ago to say goodbye as I had a decade earlier visiting a woman who was a make believe mother wife and sister, but mainly confidante and now at ninety seven fading away..  We had three wonderful days at her house in California.  That was really and truly and blissfully saying goodbye.  I have four children, six grandchildren, two great grandchildren spread all over the North American continent.  I've got a box in the closet that is supposed to go to the National Cremation Society to collect my ashes when the time comes.  I have made no plans beyond that.  My first wife is buried in Ames Iowa beside her mother in a rather large plot meant for her extended family that migrated out across the country.  My second wife is in one of the ancestral burying grounds of her family.  I wish I could see my children at the end of the road, but unlike my two living siblings I don't live anywhere near them and they have their own lives to lead.  Makes me think of my mother who died one afternoon lying on her sofa watching the McCarthy-Army hearings on television.  She lived alone, we all lived quite far away.  But her funeral a week later was a chance for us six siblings to get together for one of the last two times in our long lifetimes, all together, as a family.  Too bad she couldn't have joined us.