Dead Relatives

If a person lives long enough he or she will accumulate some dead relatives.  That is especially true if a large family exists as a storehouse of potential dead folks. I have both the age factor and the large family factor going for me.  So in my sixty-six years I’ve racked up quite a scorecard.  I have a dead father, a brother, four grandparents, ten uncles, eight aunts, a couple of cousins, some cousins’ spouses, a mother and father-in-law, a brother-in-law and several other folks related by marriage.  Since the focus here is on relatives I won’t even begin to count dead friends and acquaintances.
 

Some might think I’m being callous in this matter-of-fact accounting.  But I’m not.  Each of these dead relatives is a source of really fond memories and countless stories.  They were all good people, some were even great in their way, and each made a big impact on my life. When they died I felt great loss and mourned each of them in my own way.
 

However, mourning must end and the usefulness of dead relatives must be acknowledged.  Besides the occasional humorous story and nostalgic memory dead relatives serve a vital function, if we pay attention.  By observing how our relatives passed (now there is an ambiguous way of describing death) we learn the ways death operates, how transient life is and how some folks seem to die well and nobly.  Those are some powerful lessons and I’m just now coming to understand their importance.
 

Writers of every kind have written about death in every type of literature.  From comic books to rose colored sonnets we can read about the process of dying, what happens after death, how death affects those that survive, taking the life of another human and on and on.  There’s even a sub-genre of writing about folks who claim to die and then come back to life.  Most people are interested in death and dying although some avoid the subject completely.  I can understand those avoiders.  Why should they worry about the inevitable?  Reading about dying can be useful but the passage of time will probably give us the information we need, even if we never open a book.
 

Religious folks die convinced of an afterlife.  Atheists feel that the end of life is the end.  There are other kinds of believers who have some sort of hope in a continuation of their existence in one form or another, perhaps in a reincarnation cycle or some cosmological “oneness”.  And there are people who have a wait and see attitude.  But back to dead relatives.
 

The first dead relative that I can recall was my grandmother, my mother’s mother.  I was seven years old when she died after several years of severe illness.  My memories of her alive give me a picture as a stern but steady presence, often in a quiet room being attended to by an aunt or two.  But my strongest memory of her is seeing her lying in the front parlor of my grandparent’s home in a heavy, dark wooden coffin with a rosary wrapped around her unmoving fingers.  It was then that I learned about the absolute stillness of death.  In those days the funeral director would take the dead person to his place of business, do the embalming and so forth, then bring the boxed-up body back to the family home for the wake.  From there it was on to the church for a funeral and then to a cemetery for burial if the ground wasn’t too frozen.  And so it was I learned about the rituals of death.  I can only remember a couple other relatives after my grandmother who were “laid out” at home.  The move to funeral parlor viewing was well underway as I entered my teenage years.
 

It seemed like quite a few years went by before more dead relatives came along.  One of my uncles, I think, was the next.  And then another grandparent, another uncle, a cousin until it seems like there was a steady procession.  Not too many years passed by without a relative passing on.
 

My father died in 1987.  He was sixty-five years old.  That was when I learned something about the ability of some people to die well and nobly.  And I also became aware of the potential of powerful medicines to make the dying a little easier.  Those are both important lessons.
 

My brother died shortly after surgery to remove one of his legs.  The surgery didn’t kill him but a heart attack quickly and effectively did the job.  His death was probably a blessing in many ways.  It took me a long time to realize that, sometimes, death can be a blessing.  That is a hard lesson to accept.
 

I’ve been with a few relatives just before they died, hours before in fact.  It was always a great comfort knowing I saw those folks alive instead of only at their viewing.  They taught me the importance of visiting sick relatives and sharing a few moments remembering better days before taking leave of life.  And visiting sick relatives, as tough a job as that can be, is an invaluable task.
 

So there you have a few examples of the usefulness of dead relatives.  I expect to learn more as time moves along.  I wish I didn’t have to learn all these lessons with so much pain and sorrow.  But death doesn’t offer any easier options.
 

So have a fine day.  You’re alive after all.