THE SEVENTY-SEVENTH YEAR

By Sallie Satterthwaite
sallies@juno.com

“What were you thinking of? You were a million miles away.” The question startled her back to the present “I was just thinking how glad your Mother would be that we’re doing this. I can’t think of anything that would have pleased her more.” The others at the table nodded affirmation and someone proposed a toast with the good Chablis the wine steward had presented. In the brief moment it took to raise the glasses, she remembered the sequence of events, and the twist of emotions surrounding them.

The phone call: “The neighbors found her when they noticed she didn’t pick up her paper from the front yard. (She never would have just let it lie there, soaking up dew.) “She was in her slip, on the bedroom floor for several hours….had apparently been dressing for the VFW pancake breakfast…. “She’s deeply unresponsive now….could go any time, or last for months….you’d better come.” She remembered her surprise. Her own mother, much older, had been deteriorating for several years, and she had been braced for such a call from the nursing home in Pennsylvania. But her mother-in-law had been – or seemed – in remarkable health, busy in her community, puttering around her little house and yard on Lemon Bay. Since Dad had died three years before, she had lost interest in traveling, and her occasional lapses of memory irritated her. But to be felled by a stroke at 76 years of age: Unbelievable. The trips to Florida, a sort of interstate vigil, then at last the call after a month in a coma. It had been agreed that Mother would be kept as comfortable as possible and allowed a natural death, a gift we would covet for ourselves. The doctors were fully supportive and assured us that the old woman’s dignity was duly respected. She thought back on the impersonal funeral – her in-laws were not church-goers – and the stranger who read the service, and she heard herself murmuring, “She had a name. She was a person. You didn’t know her. Couldn’t you even go to the trouble to find out her name?” The house on Lemon Bay was a museum, a repository for the souvenirs and artifacts of a lifetime. Dad was a travel agent, and brittle picture albums bore witness to his climbing the pyramids and passing through the locks of Panama and visiting the tiny English village which bore the tongue-twisting family name. Sorting through her mother-in-law’s things, choosing bits of memories to take home – a topaz dinner ring, some brass candlesticks, snapshots of her husband as a skinny schoolboy – she expected at any moment Mother would walk into the living from her bedroom with that absentminded, raised eyebrow look of surprise she had: “Oh, why, hello dear! I forgot you were here.” They found, cached away for granddaughters now grown, dolls from Spain, llama rugs from Peru, Irish linens. There were old ledgers recording daily egg productions during a brief try at farming, and diaries chronicling her children’s growth, and the letters! Letters from the boys off at Scout camp, then military school, then the Air Force. Letters from the daughter-in-law who was determined to prove herself worthy, letters from grandchildren learning to write, and the last letter written by the favorite granddaughter and namesake who died young. She remembered the stories of her husband and his brother, who, as boys, were the dreamer and the schemer. One introspective and systematic, the other a charmer who lived by his wits, they grew into good, decent men, and the affection between them deepened with each passing year. The estate was settled, and so here they were, the brothers and their wives of a quarter century. The ship was steaming through easy Caribbean seas and a black starry night, and its dining room was festive and ringing with silver laughter and crystal. Suddenly the lights dimmed, and as a rollicking calypso tune poured over the tables and filled the galleys and passageways, uniformed waiters, grinning in pleasure, bore flambés. They formed a glowing parade, swaying through the salon to the beat of a steel band. Glasses clicked. “To Mother,” she spoke softly. “It’s been exactly a year, but I know you’re with us tonight, and as happy as we are that we’re here together.” Nearly 23 years later, she still remembers.