My grandmother died. She was the last living of my grandparents. She lived to 102. I don’t want to live to be 102.
I saw her for the last time towards the end, after she’d been on hospice for eons. She hadn’t reliably known me for a few years by then, but, really, who can blame her? She had 7 children, a gaggle of grand-children, and an even gaggler of great-grandchildren. But she’d fallen into a sort of liminal life, tiny like a gnarled bird, toothless mouth gaping and milky eyes staring at something or someone no one else could see.
Our visits were cheerier than you’d expect, cousins and aunts and uncles and parents and children filtering in and out in interesting (sometimes surprising) groupings, chatting and laughing about the past. We sang hymns for her when we saw her last, and I cupped her soft, papery cheek and whispered goodbye. I hoped she would let go soon.
And she did, a few days later. Her memorial was beautiful. We sang boisterously to her memory and with joy that she might be reunited with my grandfather, minds intact once again. We sweated our hearts out in the stuffy loft, the air so heavy you could feel its gathering oppression with each step.
Lunch afterwards was a cheerful affair too, with picture boards of Oma at the front. “Bits and pieces,” my cousin, Michelle, said. “When you look at all these photos of her, you can see bits and pieces of all of us in the planes of her face.” So many of us, so many bits, so many pieces. She was right. So many children. Children upon children, children having children, children raising children. Bits and pieces.
And so I thought, in 65 years, what will my family see in my face? What secrets will camera angles unveil? Will they see Kathryn? Nathaniel? Their faces carry the pain of my mistakes, the reminder of who I am but not what I wanted to be. I suppose that, in that way, I do leave a legacy. A legacy of opportunities not just missed but offered up as sacrifice to the pitiful altar of my own oppression. A legacy of laying down long after the foot left my throat because it’s so damn hard to get back up. A legacy of someone else’s thistle children, birthed from basement golems, just to keep the trauma wheel grinding. A legacy of not being good enough even for a basement golem birth, not even a crumb of the gifts they received with less than any thought at all. Rewarded for existing, rewarded for spreading their legs, rewarded for lying, rewarded for sloth. I didn’t know there was nothing left for me until it was too late.
Will it matter what I wanted, or how I wanted it? Not much matters after the body turns to dust, and all that’s left is photographs and family trees to connect us. No autobiography, just biology, entwining for the ages all the black, sinewy weeds I could happily forget if not for their supplanting me.
I hope no one comes to my funeral.