Cathy was obsessed with death. As the last born into our family of six children, the one topic she’d invariably ask me on hers, and each of our siblings birthdays was, ”Who do you think will go first?”
My answer remained immutable. “Go where?”
“You know,” she’d persist. “Die.”
I never thought and never guessed, letting her speculate year in and out, mostly by phone from a distance, but the last sixteen years in person.
The first time she asked and answered was while putting together a Scrap Book she received for her birthday in 1957.
“It’ll be David.” She was matter-of-fact about it.
“Why?”
“Because I’m 9 today and he’s 9 years older, so as the start he’s closer to finishing.”
“You think you’ll watch us all go?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet,” she admitted, busily writing 1954 or 1955 under every photograph being pasted in the album.
“The house photo was from when we left there in 1953, and you weren’t even four years old in those other ones,” I corrected. “They should say 1951 and 1952.”
“I know. My book is about the before we aren’t ever again.”
She was referencing how my father had sold our home on the newly wrong side of town in favor of a house none of us wanted but him. So, she was right from the get-go. We weren’t.
The most cherished gift Cathy ever gave me was her Scrap Book.
In the center of the first page she had cellophane-taped a caption from a 1950’s local newspaper photograph:
“I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved: the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.” — George Eliot
Almost as if she always knew.
Cathy left us in 2016.
The first of six.
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Marguerite Quantaine is an essayist and author.
M A G P I E à la modus operandi 