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At least, remembering.
When I was little, my grandfather died. I loved my grandfather, for a thousand reasons I couldn’t tell you, and a thousand stories I could barely remember.
After it happened, I hid out back, up in the tree that grew halfway out of our fence, where the neighbors used to throw green peaches at my friends and me, and where we used to throw them at the neighbors.
I couldn’t stop crying, no matter how hard I jammed my fists into my eyes. I guess I never realized people could die before.
First my dad came outside and tried to talk me down out of that stupid tree. Then my mom tried. Nothing they said could make me feel any better. I asked if my grandpa was in Heaven, like they said in Sunday school. My mom said she wasn’t sure. It was the historian in her. She said no one really knew what happened when we died.
Maybe we became butterflies. Maybe we became people all over again. Maybe we just died and nothing happened.
I only cried harder. A historian isn’t really what you’re looking for in that kind of situation. That’s when I told her I didn’t want Poppi to die, but more than that, I didn’t want her to die, and even more than that, I didn’t want to die either. Then she broke down.
It was her dad.
I came down from the tree on my own afterward, and we cried together. She pulled me into her arms, right there on the back steps of Wate’s Landing, and said I wouldn’t die.
I wouldn’t.
She promised.
I wasn’t going to die, and neither would she.
After that, the only thing I remember was going inside and eating three pieces of raspberry-cherry pie, the kind with the crisscross sugar crust. Someone had to die before Amma would make that pie.
Eventually, I grew up and grew older and stopped looking for my mom’s lap every time I felt like crying. I even stopped going in that old tree. But it was years before I realized my mom had lied to me. It wasn’t until she left me that I even remembered what she’d said.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I don’t know what any of this is really about.
Why we bother.
Why we’re here.
Why we love.
I had a family, and they were everything to me, and I didn’t even know it when I had them. I had a girl, and she was everything to me, and I knew it every second I had her.
I lost them all. Everything a guy could ever want.
I found my way home again, but don’t be fooled. Nothing’s the same as before. I’m not sure I’d want it to be.
Either way, I’m still one of the luckiest guys around.
I’m not a church kind of a person, not when it comes to praying. To be honest, for me it never gets much past hoping. But I know this, and I want to say it. And I really hope someone will listen.
There is a point. I don’t know what it is, but everything I’ve had, and everything I’ve lost, and everything I felt—it meant something.
Maybe there isn’t a meaning to life. Maybe there’s only a meaning to living.
That’s what I’ve learned. That’s what I’m going to be doing from now on.
Living.
And loving, sappy as it sounds.
Lena Duchannes. Her name rhymes with rain.
I’m not falling anymore. That’s what L says, and she’s right.
