I remember watching some Christmas Production my sister was singing in. I wasn’t much more than six and my sister wasn’t much more than nine. Owing to the Christmas season, my extended family was in town watching the production as well. A soft, piano rendition of The Christmas Song (originally written by Mel Torme and Robert Wells.) started. As the angelic voices crooned, “I’m offering this simple phrase to kids from one to ninety-two…” I leaned over to my great-grandmother, then ninety-four years of age, and whispered, “I guess you don’t count, Nana.” She laughed and smiled but, as I turned away, I felt her face contort back to the solemn patience of enduring children singing horribly off-key. I turned my attention back to her, noticing a single tear rolling off the side of her face. My great-grandmother was the only nonagenarian I have ever met. Most people don’t live to be much past forty. Even the healthy ones die off at around seventy. For some reason, though, females on my maternal lineage just live a long time. But, the way our society is run, it puts these people, these old ones, in a bind. We’ve set it up for these people to die at a reasonable age and when they don’t, it’s almost as if we blame them for it. No universal health care, no funded prescription medicine, the over-whelming blame that they are responsible for a George W. Bush presidency. Why do we continue pushing these people aside, holding them down, and creating an even greater sense of loneliness that, to many, is coupled with the devastation of a lost loved one? We are constantly bartering with lives because convenience is often an easier issue when someone has a max of ten to twenty years in them. And the over-used slogan of, “and those are the worst years anyway” is self-defeating. We’ve made them the worst years. We’ve neglected these people so much and for so long that we’ve truly brought it upon ourselves. We have no media outlets, no rock singers, no foreign-born terrorists to blame for this one. I never really knew my great-grandmother all that well. She died not two years after that Christmas. My parents and grandparents still tell stories about her and her strange, idiosyncratic ways: her odd phrases and sayings, her home-cooking, the fact that old age alone allowed her to lose enough weight to no longer be considered obese. She always had a cat on her lap when she came to visit. She always told me about the “good news” she’d heard about my progress in school; and she’d always slip me money for it when my parents weren’t looking. Eventually, though, she started withering away. She started calling me “Jim” (my uncle’s name) more often than “Darin.” And, one day, when my mother picked me up at the black-mailbox on my way home from school, she told me that she had died. “She went peacefully” said my mother. “I’d like for you to tell me your thoughts on her. On death. On how you feel about all this.” She was the first person I had ever known who had died. “I’m okay, mom.” I ran into the garage and grabbed a basketball. I never really thought much about it. I never just said, “Hey. That person is no longer alive. That person who gave birth to the woman who gave birth to the woman who gave birth to me. She was alive yesterday and she’s dead today. All her thoughts, feelings, emotions, her not knowing the difference between her 32 year old grandson and eight year old great-grandson. Everything she’d ever cooked, everything she’d ever said or thought or wanted to change about herself. Everything she loved about herself. Everything she loved about everyone else. Everything everyone wished they could have said to her but didn’t. Gone. She was just a memory.” Why couldn’t I have said that at the time? Why couldn’t I have grasped those concepts then? Was I just too young and naïve? Was I just so complacent with shooting basketballs? Or was it a conditioned reaction to know that she was old and she had been on borrowed time for the past twenty years. At her funeral, people wore black and cried and said things like, “she lived a good life.” Everyone had stories about her. Some humorous, some melancholy. Some insightful, I suppose, but I was too busy doodling on the back of my program and remembrance song lyric sheet to pay any attention. I remember thinking, “it sure would have been cool if she made it to 100. Oh well.” It didn’t matter anyway. She had already passed ninety two and her Christmases were no longer merry. Her husband had died long ago and she spent her days doing cross word puzzles, petting cats, and forgetting the names of her posterity. But I never realized until now what that tear during the song was for. I had hit the nail on the head without even realizing it. With one sentence, I had summed up society’s view of people who made it her age; people who managed to make the mistake of not dying in a timely manner: “I guess you don’t count, Nana.” And now, eleven years too late, I have made the realization that all she wanted to do was count. She just wanted to live on this earth like a human with other humans. Live like she had lived for the first half of her life—have trials and love and loss and adventure. She wanted to create memories rather than just rehashing the old ones. She wanted to feel alive but her environment told her, “No. You simply do not count.” Her death certificate claims she died in 1991. But I get this feeling that her life stopped long before then. |