Love Lifted Me

1 Two Silver Dollars 1914 The story begins with an end. The story begins with a death. When Lucy, then a girl of twelve, heard her mother say, “Sister, get the silver dollars,” she could hardly believe it. She stood as still as the curtains on the screenless window with no breeze to move them, still for a second or two because no one questioned or disobeyed Mama, and no one was allowed to touch the silver dollars except Mama. “Lucy, Sister, get the silver dollars.” Lucy could neither move nor take her eyes off her little brother. He had been sick for a day, coughing through the night. And now he was so still. Little William was not moving. His eyes were open but not blinking. His chest, still covered with last night’s mustard plaster, was bluish. Little William wasn’t breathing. At five, Little William was dead. Setting aside a child’s fearful fascination with death and the long-standing prohibition against touching the silver dollars, Lucy left the bedroom she shared with her brother and ran to the hall closet. She opened the door, reached to the back of the shelf where the silver dollars were kept in a black leatherette box behind the guest towels, and took it to her mother. Only Mama had held the box of silver dollars before this moment, and only then when she was called on to clean, wash, and clothe a body for burial. In this moment, a community function became a family function. In rural South Georgia in 1914, the dead were not embalmed. There were no funeral directors and no funeral parlors, just as there were no antibiotics, no antivirals, and no Xanax, Prozac, or Zoloft. People got sick at home, people died at home, and people were buried from home. The family doctor who came to the house the night before had said Little William had the flu, and there was nothing to do but to keep him comfortable and have him drink plenty of water. And so Little William died just before the great viral pandemic of 1917, from what was then incorrectly called the “Spanish Flu.” He was washed, dressed in his Sunday clothes, and spent the first night of death at home in his own little bed. The next day he was buried in a casket no bigger than the cedar chest he used to sit on in the hall every afternoon while waiting for Papa to come home from work. A cardboard casket, covered with a gray cloth stretched thin across the lid and around the sides. When death comes suddenly and without warning, grief is doubled—often denied or delayed, and sometimes never finished. Little William’s mother, Mama, was my maternal grandmother. She was never able to grieve. She could not “come to terms” with his death; she could not “move on,” as we now say. She directed the anger she could not speak to those nearest her, toward her husband and her other children, defending Little William’s place within herself, a place of few images and simple memories. He was her baby. He was only five. This is how Lucy, my mother, remembered the day.