Mourn and Move On

Stubborn to the last, Aunt Lizzie refused to go the mainland hospital.

She had, according to her own words, not been able to leave her makeshift single bed in the kitchen for years. It was a mystery how she managed to cook and clean and keep the fire going in that one small room, how her white hair was always washed and woven into neat braids, how she never appeared to want for anything. When we made our obligatory visits, she received us gratefully and demanded news of everything. Nana said that late at night, under cover of darkness with no one about, shadows moved in the house, a figure passed from window to window, from downstairs to up and back again. Lizzie, she said with a knowing wink at my mother, appears to be selectively bedridden. What a miracle! And she would shoo us off to play outside.

One early morning, having seen nothing of the shadows in the night, Nana packed a basket of warm muffins and trudged next door. There was no answer to her knock so with typical determination she forced the hook and latch and calling Lizzie's name loudly, barged right in. The kitchen was uncharacteristically cold, she told us later, and there was Lizzie, laying on an armful of kindling and stone cold dead, one hand clutching the blankets from the tiny bed against the wall, the other still wound around a candle lying in a spill of wax on the shiny linoleum floor. I'll be damned if she wasn't smiling, my grandmother told Aunt Pearl later that day, Deader than a two day old mackerel and still smiling.

There was no family left so Nana and Pearl and Vi organized a small funeral and saw Lizzie well planted in the church cemetery. John Sullivan was recruited to bring flowers and Uncle Len saw to it that there were mourners at the grave, picked up and returned home in his old pickup, each given a new $5 bill for attending. Miss Rowena came down from her home on the hill and sang nearly all the verses to "Shall We Gather at the River" before being shushed by Miss Hilda with a sharp poke of her walking stick, No need to be excessive, dear, Miss Hilda remarked in her clipped British tones, Three verses is adequate indeed.

After the service, tea was served in the parsonage and Lizzie's long life was examined, celebrated, and mourned in quick order. She had been an invalid since her early 20's when her husband, a ship's carpenter, had died from food poisoning, a tainted batch of scallops some said, ingestion of arsenic others suggested since he had been known to beat her regularly and without mercy. After his death, she had taken to her bed and had never been known to leave her house again, content to allow the outside world to come to her for more than 60 years. We all mourn and move on in our own way, the pastor was heard to say, she won't be allowed to withdraw from the Lord.

There was a quiet chorus of amens.