Life Spans

My Dad's siblings and cousins all lived to be well into their 90's, living on their own til the end.  Only two died younger, in accidents, his little brother dying on a swift river, his Uncle, Royal Crown Brown, dying at 84 of a heart attack as he raced his motorcycle down a mountain road. I don't know if that longevity came down from their ancestors or if the rest of them were just particularly hardy and lucky. My Aunt spent several years, including travel to England, Scotland and Ireland, to trace their heritage after my Uncle the engineer, died. Many of their ancestors lived long lives for the times, though Dad's Great Great (insert more Great's here) Grandfather, Oliver Cromwell, died before sixty.

My Dad never once spoke of his own Father, who died long before I came along. My Mom said not to ask about him, alluding to things we knew enough, even young, not to ask further about. It was hard to picture my laughing, smiling, generous and doting Father, coming from such a background that was hinted it. It was if he was miscast for a time and knowingly accepted that role for reasons worth his enduring it, but not of sharing it.

His mother died before her time, killed as a pedestrian on a city street, some years after the War.

I've seen pictures of her with her children, no photos with my Grandfather to be found in the photos Dad has kept. She was a tiny little thing with 3 strapping, handsome sons and a tall, red haired, strong willed daughter. She looked older than her years, eyes perpetually sad, her face with a look like it was expecting a blow. But you could still see the traces of beauty in her, a plant that had been transplanted to a harsher climate, its branches breaking in the harsh Winter cold.

On his dresser still, a carefully framed and dusted photograph of her, the only photo in the room where he sleeps.

A picture, but few words, I know little of her. But decades later, unknowingly driving him past the place where she was accidentally struck and killed by a car while walking to get food, he broke down and sobbed. It was a sound I never expected to hear from him, an echo of heartbreak that sounded from that trammeling memory, never to be mentioned again. 

Nothing ever truly heals. My Dad picks up his mother's Bible, with hands that left home early, to  become a Golden Gloves boxer, a military policeman, someone who could come home and protect her. Life didn't let him, a scar he bears silently, with the others that do not show.

So many years he has had to live with those memories, but I was happy when in the Fall of 2012, the last travel for his lifetime, he went to his Dad's grave in Montana with Big Bro. All he said was "I have to make my peace". In those words, there was a moment of profound understanding, unexpected and short lived, like a glance of some incessant, saving truth.

We live now, as a society, decades longer than those of our ancestors. I remember reading the book "Alaska" by James Michenor and in the opening chapter, there in the dawn of time, they speak of "the ancient one", a woman who was a great healer and spiritual leader. She was in her 30's. Oh great, I thought as I read it "first, the big three oh, now I'm ancient".

Now, most of us can expect to live well into our 70's and 80's, some living into their hundred's. Yet, some creatures live only months or even days.

Late into the fall, a cricket moved into my garage of the crash pad.  Night after night he chirped away on the other side of my bedroom wall.  Leaving the garage door open a bit didn't encourage him to leave, only to have a kegger with some of his bigger friends. I was able to shoo them out, but he hopped into a little crack to hide, so he could continue to serenade me.  After a few nights of that I was wondering as to ways to dispatch him (would using a silencer on a cricket be illegal or apropos?)

I did a little checking on line, apparently the life span of the average field cricket is just a couple of months.  Already an adult, he likely had only a few weeks to live, if that.

The poor little guy, he doesn't even make it to Halloween, but each night he sang as if he would live forever. I didn't have the heart to capture him and move him outside.  He could stay safe in my garage as my pet cricket. I named him "Mort".

Consider the hummingbird, such a small creature with such a high metabolism, yet is has a life span much greater than you'd think, some living more than a decade. I watch them from the feeders in summer, warring for the liquid nectar found within, fending off others that wish to take it, watching, guarding, always wanting more of life's sweetness. No different than we.

I think of lives cut short that achieved so much for their brief time here, my favorite poet John Keats, who threw over medicine to write some of the most sublime odes in the English language, and died at 25 from TB. Percy Shelly, Xavier M. F. Bichat, French army surgeon turned pathologist, Évariste Galois, mathematician and inventor of group theory, who died at 20, Robert Fergusson, Scottish Poet, Saint Albertus Magnus.  Their words, their teachings still follow me where I go, whispering to me in unexplored depths or darkest of nights, such great thoughts, tinged with wonder and mystery, those whispers of slain genius.

Fortunately, for we humans, our life span is much longer than most creatures, if we are blessed and take care of ourselves, but even the greatest expanses of time in seem so short in recollection. Walking through the little village I live in, the sidewalk glinted with little bits of Mica. Not the prophet Micah who told us our human task is to do justly, but the geological kind. As a kid, the sidewalk would glitter like broken glass upon the tide flats from the small glints of Mica within it. My brother said it was made of broken star ships, and I believed him. For though there are limits as to what as children we may accept, there is no limit to what we can believe, nourished as we are by the embrace of the incredible that is found right beneath our feet.

Into the warm days of fall that is childhood's longest hour, in those weeks of summer vacation, we believed we'd live forever. We weren't content just to ride our bikes on these glittering trails of star-stuff, we'd get big pieces of chalk and draw on them, hop scotch, tic tac toe, our names. We'd play well into the dark, coming in only when we were hungry,the front doors unlocked to our comings and goings, time for us something we could pick up and put in our pocket.

When I go home and my brother and I laugh, there is no weather of distance between that time and now.  But have we realized that it is true, that saying that man does carry his life in his hand.  My Dad's siblings, though blessed with a hardy disposition, also possessed an intrepidity of spirit and courage that might have been called reckless in others, but in them was a natural trait when tempered with a soundness of choice. They honored their bodies as a vessel of God, and didn't abuse them with drugs or an excess of alcohol, or even food. In the pictures I see of them together I see only lean, honed strength and purpose of duty.

I look at a collection of bones on a table, to me, beautiful in their pristine immobility.  I look at a glass box that my Aunt left me that sits on my desk. In it is Urania Ripheus, known as the Sunset Moth, hovering on lifeless wings that glow in the light, as if lit aflame. From Madagascar, it is found on the shaded areas of river banks. The essence of life floats elusive, half submerged in the waters of science, buoyed by God.  I've spent the last fifteen years studying the many tragic ways it ends, still, I draw great comfort for the way it fights to remain.

Somewhere a thousand miles away, meal time drawn to a close, Dad will be in his recliner, reading that old Family Bible, the Book for all the days remaining.  Dad never knew his destiny would be to live to great age, to love deeply, outliving two wives, a love that entranced him and made him its own, to the most secret of thoughts, to the disquiet of blood, to his last exhalation.  He did not know his destiny, but he followed it with unfaltering footsteps.  The Bible is gently laid in his lap as he nods his head for a nap, the winter window fades, then glows, a living spark there among the shadowed embers.
 - Brigid