In Coastal Maine

A number of relatives knew only to start crying when they saw my grandfather, who, in the two years since his last pilgrimage to Maine, could now only walk three steps before needing a rest, and lived only with the aid of oxygen, monitored with great diligence by my mother who had done most of the planning for the trip.

We were there, at the family cemetery in Thomaston, to bury the ashes of my mother’s mother, my grandfather’s high school sweetheart in the late 30s, and his wife by 1980.  The pastor read the twenty third psalm without the letter R, and my grandfather, after some brief remark from my mother, told the small gathering about my grandmother next to a fallen redwood, claiming the photograph to be proof that she was the happiest gal you ever would meet, before the exertion and tears forced him to stop.

At the family cottage, twenty minutes away, at dinner, my family, with the exception of my grandfather, proceeded to imbibe with great zeal, and lighting citronella candles to fend off the persistent mosquitoes, we spread ourselves out, my father all the while the merry bartender.  It was a gathering of people you really only see at marriages and funerals, or in Florida, in February, to escape New England winters.

I myself turned in once one of my cousins began running shirtless around the kitchen, showing us a tattoo on his left shoulder.  It was after that point that he composed an open letter to us all that suggested that, now that Marie was gone, there was little need to maintain the falsehood that we enjoyed each other’s company.