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Written by MWLind Winner of the "In Life and Death" Contest Prompt: "It is discouraging to leave the past behind only to see it coming toward you like the thunderstorm which drenched you yesterday." -William Gass
"I would hope to face death knowingly," she had said.
I stand in front of the picture of her at the funeral. Blown up, set on a gilded easel she would have rolled her eyes at, welcoming everyone into the room. In it, she's 20 years younger, squatting in her garden, doing that quirky half-smile squint in the sunlight. I took this picture.
"Do we have to do it with the sun in my face?"
"It's better, yeah!"
I took a photography class that semester. For this assignment we had to photograph someone we loved. My mom wasn't at all insulted when I chose Aunt Jennifer, or Aunt Nifa, as I'd called her since I was three.
My mom wanted me to speak today, so I spent time writing a speech. I go over it in my head as I look around the parlor. She should have had flowers from her garden, but it's winter, her most hated season.
"I would hope to face death knowingly," she had said.
We sit together at the off-yellow formica kitchen table that she inherited from my grandma along with the house. Aunt Nifa updated almost everything (it was the house she and my mom grew up in), but for some reason she kept this table and its once-squishy cushioned chairs that had long ago lost all their squish.
My dad has just died. Suddenly. My mom has been hospitalized. I'm 13. I don't know it yet but I've just moved in with Aunt Nifa for the next year. And I can't understand what she's just said.
"Going so suddenly like that, not knowing it's gonna happen. I don't want that. I want to see it coming. I want to be prepared."
It stays with me because I take it as some kind of critique of my dad, like he did something wrong that made it end this way for him. I get over that feeling eventually, but the whole idea of facing death as something known, death as something it's possible to prepare for, that rewrites a few things in my brain.
"I'm so sorry, Kelan."
"Thank you, yeah."
Aunt Nifa's wife is here, but I seem to be the one everyone comes to first today. She married late in life (even later than we all thought, as it turned out), and Callie and I have a great relationship. But everyone knows Aunt Nifa was my third parent.
I can't move past the picture. I should go stand with my mom. I don't know how I'll be able to give this speech.
"Death sucks. It just does. But if you can feel prepared for it, make some kind of peace with it, it can suck a lot less." I'm too young to understand the words, but they get burned into my brain, along with the floral pattern on the off-yellow formica.
I'm in front of the room. My mom has an arm around Callie. Someone has turned the picture at the back of the room to face front with everyone else.
"Jennifer..." The picture squints at me. "Aunt Nifa said to me one time that she wanted to face death knowingly when it came. She didn't get to do that."
We fought bitterly that year I lived with her. Well I fought her bitterly. Of course what I was trying to fight was death.
"I owe her so much."
It came to a head when she caught me in the garden squashing her tomatoes. She laughed at me. She laughed so hard I didn't know what was happening. Then she joined me.
"Death sucks. It just does. But I know Aunt Nifa wouldn't want us to be discouraged. She was one of the few people I've ever known who really did face death. Who thought it was possible to."
Squinting into the sunlight. Squashing her own tomatoes with a bratty, damaged 13-year-old whose life she saved. Speaking truth to death.
"A garden needs sun and rain, Kelan. And compost."
