"Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is pass'd from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near:
'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let Life divide what Death can join together."
-- Percy Shelley, "Adonais"
My friend Matt had come over for a play date a week after my eighth birthday: Friday, May 17, 2002. School was canceled because the principal's elderly parents had died, and god forbid anybody else should work that day.
My family still lived in our old house in Demarest, New Jersey. It was a whitewashed, pseudo-Dutch colonial. Matt and I attended a special, Dickensian school for delinquent children. Since the school was out of town, a van had to pick us both up. During the long rides we formed a bond.
Matt was a pale-skinned, brown-haired, big-red-lipped wisp of a boy who always dressed in sweaters of some sort or another.
Anyway, he and I were playing with my red wagon, lugging it up the driveway, which had a decent incline, and riding it to the bottom. We had to be careful not to crash into the garage, which lay at the trough of the hill. We did this for what felt like hours on end, but was probably only 45 minutes.
Eventually, like all children, we tired of it and looked for something else to do. Walking up the driveway we passed close to the front of the house. A woman's shriek attracted our attention. A low, throbbing moan followed it.
Entering the house, Matt and I found my mother kneeling, trembling, with a swarthy, sweat- and tear-drenched face. Her brown hair was stringy, and her eyes were clenched shut. Again and again she screamed, "No! No! No!" She clutched the headpiece of a telephone in her hand. Slowly it slipped from her grip, and clattered on the floor.
Being immature little punks, Matt and I found this tableau hilarious and guffawed accordingly. Our laughter brought my mother out of her seeming delirium.
"This isn't funny, you little *****s! It isn't funny!" she said repeatedly, her breath hitching.
My mother's ravaged face checked our laughter.
"Mom," I said.
She shuddered and wailed. "My mother's dead." She paused, then: "Nanny's dead, you **********s."
We stared at her with fish eyes. Here was the first death that I had encountered in my life.
My nanny, my grandmother, was supposed to explain the intricacies of the world to me, all while puffing away on her Basics cigarettes and lacing her sentences with the kind of language that would make most grandmothers blush. She was supposed to be my most faithful reader, laughing at the foibles of my characters and the comeuppances of the antagonists.
But a stroke had ended all that. A stroke had taken our matriarch, and driven us apart. I'd learned that death can do that. It can divide. It can conquer. It can alienate people from their own kin. And it almost did.
Getting back to the quote at the top:
"No more let Life divide what Death can join together."
Its author, Shelley, meant that death equalizes paupers and princes. But that phrase means something else for my family. By embracing our shared grief, by coming together and talking about Nanny through laughs and tears, we have rediscovered our love for one another, and found a new matriarch: my mother. Death needn't be the end of one queen's reign. Instead, it is the beginning of another's.
