The Wisdom of Cousins

"When I die, I want to go peacefully, as my grandfather did--in his sleep--not yelling and screaming like the passengers in his car."

I ought, but I am incapable of enough shame, to apologize for the nature of that anonymous quote. While I have nearly always been incapable of remembering people's names, I find that I wobble my way through the difficult times remembering things I ought not to say aloud. I did not, in this case--this case being the death of my first wife--probably because the quote was not apropos, and everyone knows that.

We met in Decorah, Iowa, where we had last lived together, at the house where we had lived together, now alive with Margaret's daughter, and son-in-law, and grandchildren. Other children came, with some of their children.

The younger called themselves, appropriately, "cousins". They gathered like spokes around their grandmother, on the wheel of life and, as they should, lamented their commonalities and celebrated their differences.

Because I am old, I did my own celebrating at that ceremony of death: I smiled, appropriately somberly--in public--and broadly in private, at the generations of siblings and cousins and families formed who understood that it was their time to do what had to be done when life ended; who never said so, but who understood that life is a generational thing received and given.

I am very proud, but when I go, I will do so in a passenger seat of grandfather's car. The cousins will know how to deal with it.

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