Dear Genevieve

My maternal grandmother is 87 years old. She was in the hospital with some sort of bleeding from the colon. She had a minor stroke, etc..all the things that remind a person that their organ systems are on the verge of cataclysmic failure. They sent her home, presumably because it is Christmas, and there is not much they can do to cure being OLD. I just sent her this letter snail mail. I have been a very distant grandson, partially because I am one voice among very many grandchildren and partially because my huge, extended, Midwestern Catholic family live in totally different mindspaces. Here is an attempt to bridge the gap. One more letter, before she surfs off into the primordial cosmic ocean. Annotations are in red.

Dear Grandma,

I am so glad to hear that you are back from the hospital. Christmas, snowfall, great grandchildren (How many do you have, at this point?)….all still here and waiting for you. I am an evolutionary biologist, so at the wedding, last summer, I tried to count how many copies of your genes are represented in this next, coming generation. The figure was staggering. You are, in a very immediate and real way, responsible for so many of us being here. Thank you. I like being here, on this Earth, and some of what makes me the person who I am comes from you.

I think that, from you, I have inherited a certain dogged, persistent, indestructible serenity. In your life, you have been through so much, and done so much. You have every reason to be ornery. However, every moment I have ever spent with you, regardless of the circumstances, you have been serene, calm, thoughtful. This was certainly the case when you cut the head off of a chicken in front of me. I was six or seven at the time, I think. You didn’t exactly charm the head off of that chicken. You manhandled it with the grim determination of a job that needed to be done. Despite this, there was something accepting, calm, resolute, and patient about the way you did it. It was work, not violence. That was an invaluable lesson for me to learn. I kill insect specimens during my work, many of them, all beautiful bees, and I dispatch them all with a certain dignity.

ALSO I got to see a chicken run around with its head cut off. Thank you. That was awesome for about a million different reasons.

By then, mom and dad had already done a good job of teaching me where food comes from, and also, that farm animals are not pets and that some of them have to die. That day, I learned another lesson, a different one, something stranger, much more interesting. The brain really does control the body. What we are-what makes us real, is locked up in our heads, somewhere. It seemed to be very important to avoid decapitation.

Thank you, once again, for every single time you have sent ten dollar checks, in Christmas cards, to me. When I was a kid, this was some of the only money I had. I love you so much. Among other things, that money has taught me how to start a bank account and how to keep money in it. It has also helped me to buy my first car. It has helped me to buy Dungeons and Dragons modules, so that I could spend my youth drawing maps of nonexistent caverns.

I am so glad I got a chance to see you at the wedding last summer. It was a particularly fun wedding, and Jan and I chose a good moment to go out and see my enormous extended family. Strange, isn’t it? Watching so many people grow up. When I was a kid, on the farm, I remember Jane attempting to cheer me up. For some reason, I think, a horsefly bit my eye. She stuck a penlight up her nose and made her nostril glow. She was an independent, feisty, powerful girl. I looked up to her. She will be a grandmother soon, most likely (or is she already? I forget...oh well).

It is Christmas, and I am sure you miss Lee. To me, he was a giant of a man-a force of nature. It might seem odd to you, since you know I am not religious, that I have arrived at some of the same conclusions about immortality, the soul, the spirit. I think like a scientist, and I ask big questions. Recently, I have had plenty of my own experiences that indicate there is something about all of us, some essential element, that lives on somewhere after we die, which was probably present before we were born. (These experiences were on LSD, by the way, some of them on my friend Lauren's bed, listening to Dvorak, as strange tendrils of my being that extend into other people, other times, became as palpable and real as the roach I was about to light. I didn't share that. I have had other times, such as the time at the Cradle of Filth show, high as a kite on marajuana brownies, that I saw the cosmic all, and a million possible incarnations of my recently dead pet, Limonata (a cockatiel), flapping and squaking down at me appreciatively) I can’t imagine what it will be like to ride that big wave back to wherever it goes next, some primordial ocean of the soul. It happens to all of us, sooner or later. When I was a kid, I used to think of the people in heaven as a place full of old people, except for the relatively few among them who died young. I imagined a very geriatric heaven, full of canes and wheelchairs. More realistic, don’t you think, to consider the notion that a person becomes the sum total of all of the people they were over their lifetime?

I know you heard Susie’s story about the day Lee passed on. Here’s mine. That same day, I was at the Field Museum in Chicago. I went to see a Lecture, but I had the time completely wrong. The security people let me into the museum long after closing time, because of the Lecture, which was over. Realizing that there was no lecture, I spent hours, alone, in the museum. Finally, I had the place to myself. Some strange extension of my grandfather passed through me that day, about the same time he passed on into the next world. I was standing in front of an enormously old shark skeleton, wondering if there was any evidence in the museum that I could use to convince him that it really was three hundred million years old. I felt him there, somehow. I checked my messages outside and learned that he had finally gone on, and I nodded goodbye to the man, imagining him, as a young man with a square jaw, wearing a fedora hat, behind the wheel of an enormous combine, threshing up extinct trilobites and crionoids, listening to the farm report from the Paleozoic, spraying pesticide on giant cockroaches out the window of the cab.

I love you, grandma.

Very much.

Alan