Regarding Family Math

Dad, Mom, and Me, 2014

Regarding Family Math:

My father’s math is easy—1920 and it’s eighty years to 2,000. Add twenty-six and you’ve got 106, his age he would have been on his birthday two days from now.

My mother’s is a bit more tricky—1924. Take the eighty, just in as dad’s, add the twenty-six, but then subtract the four from the eighty, equaling 102. Also, consider the fact that her birthday is in December, not August, so the math will be accurate in five months.

I’ll say right here that the math keeps me sharp, as if doing this one example of math will neutralize time. I know a couple of calculations will not placate time’s hunger, but we feed the dog whatever scraps we have handy.

It’s not the birthdays but the days of their deaths that I have trouble with. I just can’t seem to be able to memorize them. I have no inclination. The death days elude me. It’s like creeping charley slowly encroaching the stones that mark their graves, blurring the edges, greening the clean lines, last year’s dried detritus muffling and cloaking the sharp etched letters.

It’s not that I’m a bad son (or uncaring brother to my younger brother and older sister, both gone), and I’m not forgetful. Perhaps I’m the rebellious one in the family, refusing to remember, refusing to die. Perhaps I’m having a hard time calculating eternity.

I think it’s best to stick with beginning numbers like birthdays and just add as we go along. The math is kinder. We can all age in grace together, a day and a year at a time. My brother would have been two years younger, my sister would have just turned four years older a week ago. My first wife coming up five years older in October if cancer had not chewed through the lifeline of her chronology.

My great-uncle Charley lived to be almost a hundred. My mother told me he walked everywhere, always active, and even walked for no good reason—he just liked to be out and about. In his brown leather boots he’d step off down the road, no feeble creeping along. Then he was struck down by a car on one of his ambles. I vaguely remember the man, sitting on a wooden porch on an old kitchen chair, the first two fingers of his right hand deeply browned by cigarette smoke. 

“You’re in trouble when you stop moving,” my mother always said.

I remember her in her hospice bed, panting out her last breaths, unmoving other than the labor of her lungs. I imagine Uncle Charley chugging down the road, his leather boots sending up poofs of dust, small explosions of effort until the big bang of his ending life. My dad begged for me to break him out of the rest home. “Let’s just take off!” he said. “There’s the door, wheel me outta here. They won’t even notice!” His hands gripped the wheelchair, ready for the big push to outdistance his dementia.

My heart pumps faster when I remember, when I do the math. The open road beckons, out and gone, the hell and gone down the road, rolling free. I stick to the math of birthdays. I find that reassuring. Every year is just a “plus one,” a simple calculation. It’s reassuring, knowing that the way math works, you can “plus one” forever. Just imagining it, maybe that’s as close as we get to eternity here on earth.

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