All that matters is the familiar heads bobbing through the woods, sunlight sparking bright patches at our feet. We are all happy for this warmer day.

It was Tami’s idea to walk on Christmas. This year, we start from our house, hiking across one of the feeder creeks, over the hill, across the dam, and up the driveway towards the yellow house.

Susan meets us on the road, and she and Tony lead us up their new trails which are edged in straight lengths of downfall.

We all gasp when we reach the labyrinth. Tony and Susan have cleaned up the old Sunday Circle, embodying its spirit in a spiral. We linger, several of us walking the maze, feeling gratitude for the earnest energy assembled here. Matter become energy. All those rocks, each one lifted into place.

We continue towards the burial grounds where Zafer lies with Chris, and Mark, Lyle’s parents, and Tami’s father, Ed. I move from bench to bench, beaming a silent “Merry Christmas” towards each pine straw covered mound. I think about their essence, the sound of their voices, and picture their molecules dispersed.

Bob is laying on the ground forty feet away and I get up to see what’s going on. “I’ve picked out our gravesite,” he says. “Come lay beside me.” I kneel on the soft earth, stretch out, and stare at the sky through the tall pine crowns before closing my eyes.

My friends murmur contentedly nearby, our buffer against the uncertain world outside the neighborhood. Nothing else matters but the feel of the earth cradling my hips and shoulders, the warm shaft of light at my throat. A cardinal sings and I exhale deeply.

As Bob and I were leaving Lake Mills for Chicago, we decided to stop at Rock Lake Cemetery and pay our respects to Cousin Patty’s family. We drove in and immediately realized were never going to find Aunt Lois and Uncle Dick among twenty-five acres of markers.

So we called Patty for help. Lucky for us, she was free and willing to come over and show us around.

I listened to Patty’s stories about her parents, her younger brother, and her older sister. I was a fly on a tree with a camera, picturing myself in Patty’s shoes.

Patty’s younger brother died when she was nineteen years old. I could not get my heart around the magnitude of this tragedy. I tried and failed to imagine losing one of my precious brothers before I had found my footing in life.

I stared incomprehensibly at Patty’s sister’s tarnished white plaque, realizing that I am a lucky outlier, a seventy-year-old woman who has not lost any brothers or cousins.

Bob’s father, Bill, had two siblings, Patty’s father, Richard, and Becky’s mother, Mary. Patty’s mother, Lois, passed at the age of ninety-five in February and her father left this earth in 2010.

Both Patty and Steve told us how Lois was able to walk up the stairs to their place without holding onto the railing. They said it wasn’t until recently that she complained she was no longer able to pull on her socks while standing up. Ever since hearing that, I think of Bob’s Aunt Lois each time I’m tempted to sit down to put on my socks.

We had a second grave to find, this one on Aunt Mari’s side of the family. We spotted it right off, looming in the distance not far from the Armantrout plots.

Patty had told us that Mari’s son Scott had spared no expense on his memorial, but we were unprepared for what we found. The three of us stared at the towering black monument, stifling giggles and sighing.

Scott got cancer as a young boy but lived into his fifties, consuming every day as if it were his last. He came from money, so that helped. Bob says Scott always had the fastest motorcycle and the fastest boat on Rock Lake, so it made perfect sense that he would have commissioned the largest headstone in Rock Lake Cemetery.

Patty and Bob obligingly posed next to the polished granite, dwarfed by Scott’s legacy.

Our appetites wetted with family history, we decided to find Bob’s parents. Bob looked up his father on Find a Grave, made a phone call, and drove us the short distance to Helenville.

Zion Church Cemetery was a small, well-tended roadside park surrounded by autumn corn. The church was long gone.

Bob had no trouble locating the Armantrout markers.

Here lay his oldest brother, Rich, and his parents, Bill and Alice. It’s no secret that Bob’s family did not approve of his divorce. They were unable to accept me, and eventually Bob grew tired of hearing about it. Communication dropped off. Bob’s father called to tell Bob his mother had passed, but no one reached out to him after his father and brother died. It occurs to me that memorial stones represent the weight of a lifetime, whether short or long—all the complicated relationships and unspoken truths.

I don’t know what was going through Bob’s mind as he stood before the graves. Estrangement is hard on everyone, especially the survivors. I want to believe that he got some closure while standing near these markers on a beautiful fall day.

Bob and I had been gone all week visiting my brother, James, in Massachusetts for his birthday. I had just turned 70 and Jamie was turning 59.

The three of us spent two nights on South Yarmouth in the wake of Hurricane Beryl. We enjoyed some refreshing barefoot beach time and James went for a short swim.

And then James drove us inland to celebrate his birthday with pizza, cake, and ice cream at his new home outside of Boston where we were joined by his stepdaughter and her family.

Christina and Lou’s seven kids bounced around Jamie’s lush lawn, taking turns on the swing between bites of pizza at the picnic table. No one threw up.

This was the best pizza I’d eaten in years. It had a thin, slightly salty, crispy, yet foldable crust, with blackened dough blisters, a spicy sauce, and not too much cheese. In other words, it was New York style pizza like we used to get on our birthdays from Freddie’s in West Long Branch, New Jersey.

No birthday is complete without cake and ice cream, so we did that, too.

~*~

Bob and I returned home to discover deer tracks in the garden. They had taken out a pepper plant and decimated the edamame. I tightened the clothesline I’d strung above the four-foot livestock fence in a lame attempt to fend off another garden attack, made dinner, and we went to bed and fell asleep wondering how we were going to solve our deer problem.

Bob found her the next morning, a lactating doe that had been hit by a Ford truck during the night. Problem solved. We didn’t take her picture out of respect for the dead. After picking the big plastic “R” and other truck parts out of the grass, we went inside and waited for the clean up crew.

Soon enough the vultures began to arrive. Lyle and Carrie had watched a breeding pair of Black vultures raise two chicks at their place half a mile away and we were pretty sure a group of four who were nearly always together were the same family. We were thrilled to have them at our place and be able to share our friends’ experience.

About three days in, the intermittent whiff of rot began spoiling our summer afternoon spa time. But it was short-lived—in this heat, roadkill decomposes at an accelerated pace—and a couple of days later we resumed our refreshing cold water (88°) soaks.

Although the family of four birds were the same size, we could tell the youngsters from their parents by the baby fluff around their heads and necks.

I confess that Black vultures are among my top three favorite birds along with Great blue herons and Carolina wrens.

Unlike other birds, vultures spend a lot of time standing around. They don’t have to flit about chasing bugs or searching for seeds, worrying about getting picked off by cats and hawks. Vultures are so big, they don’t worry about much of anything. They waddled up near the garden to watch Bob work, as interested in us as we were in them.

We learned that when vultures blink, they look like sharks.

Bob and I were struck by their affection towards each other and were reminded of our time in Massachusetts with Jamie and family.

Family is where you find it. Sometimes you might have to board an airplane to see them. Sometimes family comes to you after a deer gets hit on the Moncure Pittsboro Road. Either way, families make life more interesting by reminding us that we were all young once and that we are all hurtling through space on the same planet, doing our best to stay happy and fed.

We had met a couple of hours earlier at Our Lady of the Visitation Church for the viewing and funeral mass—a replay of my mother’s funeral eighteen months ago. As is the custom among Roman Catholics, it was an open casket, and for some reason, my father had on eyeglasses. He was inordinately proud of his eyesight, the kind of man who would rather die than let you catch him wearing cheaters.

After Father Joseph led the rosary, the coffin lid came down, and the guys from Fogelsanger-Bricker Funeral Home wheeled my father up to the front of the church for mass.

When mass was over, I grasped the polished wood handle and walked my father’s shiny casket from the church to the hearse with my brothers, Jim and Bob, our cousin, Brian, and our nephew and niece, Brandon and Aphia. It was as pretty a day as you can want for a funeral, clear and crisp, as lovely as the day we buried my mother.

The guys from Fogelsanger—Justin, the Kung Fu black belt, an older man, and a young girl in training—hovered like bees, reaching out to help and steady as they probably do at all their funerals. No one wants to see a coffin dropped, least of all the guys in charge.

I was a first-time pallbearer and found it heavier than expected, heavier, someone said, than the box they’d buried Mom in.

And then we took Dad for his last ride through town. I’ve always loved a parade, so I sat straight in my new, blue Tesla, bought with my father’s money, giddy with closure, resisting the urge to smile and wave, wondering what true feelings lurked beneath my bubbly exterior. I’m the oldest now, I thought. The unrestricted head of the family. “Isn’t that nice,” I felt my father hiss from the car ahead.

We parked at Spring Hill Cemetery, stepped out, and tucked our fingers through the smooth wood to move the casket from the hearse to a bier atop a hole next to Mom’s grave.

The good fathers conducted the graveside service while I stood in the sun beside my brother, Michael. We had a nice view of the proceedings, our brothers and their wives, kids, and grandkids under the red canopy, and my Bob working the angles with his Sony mirrorless.

Bob joined us, and we discussed the viewing, which Michael had not attended. Michael was surprised to hear about the glasses, agreeing that Dad would have been mortified. He had asked the director to give his father a professorial look, and noted that the glasses probably also hid a recent oddness where you could kinda/sorta see Dad’s eyes behind his eyelids.

“Here’s a fun fact,” he said. “Dad’s not wearing any shoes.”

I hoped to see them lower the casket into the earth as they did at my mother’s burial, but that didn’t happen. Finally, people began to leave, so we got in our car and drove back to the church to eat and mingle. I read my eulogy, and eventually, we all went our separate ways.

The next morning, before driving back to North Carolina, Bob and I returned to the gravesite for a look-see. We found the sod replaced with the casket flowers atop the parched grass.

I crouched down to snap a photo, hoping that my father had truly reached his final home in his bare feet and glasses, and that’s when it happened. Emotion flooded in as I pictured Mom’s white coffin inches from his. This is how we all end up, I thought, tears smarting.

I thought of their sixty-eight years together, all the pain and joy, the ups and downs, their legacy—three generations of people all destined to die—the promise shining in their great-grandchildren’s eyes, the whole circle of life swirling around in my head.

I wished I hadn’t been so joyous the day before, so all about myself hefting Dad’s coffin, playing the big girl, happy for the closure, no more feeling like I have to reach out to my father, trying to connect. I stayed there close to the earth for a while, smelling the raw soil underneath the yellowing sod.

I didn’t feel brash or joyful now. I felt small, squatting near the sod, small, and old, and tired.

My 97-year-old father died on Sunday, May 21, we buried him the following Saturday, and this is what I read at the reception:

John Peter Illo never learned to swim in water, yet he swam at odds with the cultural flow, cross grain to the tide. “My little brother was either born 100 years too early, or 100 years too late,” my Uncle Frank said, hoping to soothe my teenaged exasperation with my father.

Dad thumbed his nose at authority when it was not fashionable for his generation to do so. We picketed against the Vietnam war, he with his students and me with my school mates.

One time he stood with me on the curb outside our house on Hollywood Avenue as I waited for a ride to Washington DC for a massive anti-war rally, and I thought, I hoped, that Professor Illo would add dignity to our pimpled high school gang. But he shied away at the last minute and I watched him recede in the side mirror.

He was coddled from infancy by the woman who later coddled me. Nana cherished every one of his breaths, getting up before he woke to remove dust that might aggravate his asthmatic wheeze.

She liked to tell me, “Johnny was so clean that his teacher told me she always knew when he was coming without turning to look. ‘He smells like soap,’ she told me.”

As a child, my father read the dictionary and liked to blow things up. He set the hill behind his mother’s house on fire more than once, and watched the fire engines roar up Mountainside Avenue in a fit of dust.

He was dapper, even after developing a taste for second-hand clothes. I remember complimenting him on his suit one time. He eyed a sleeve and said, “25 cents. I paid 25 cents for this.”

Dad had a great, roaring sense of humor in the early days, laughing with his older brother on Nana’s back porch, beer sloshing perilously in their frosty mugs. He drew cartoons at the dining room table, The New York Times precisely folded to his left while Mom assembled the evening meal. He sometimes saw his own letters there and found recipes—his reenactment of their Chicken Tandoori an act of genius.

He carried me and Johnny around on his shoulders and piled us into his 1954 Ford sedan for picnic lunches at a place we called “The Boulders.” At dinner, he’d point to the window and say, “Look!” then top off our milk glass. “Whaaa?” we would say when we turned back to the table and found our glass full again. “It’s a magic glass!” he’d say.

John’s father, Frank, was beloved by many, unhampered by his illiteracy, a kind man with an inventor’s brain who ran all eleven Shubert Theaters in New York City. Nana didn’t think much of Grandpa’s inability to read, so my father became hyper-literate. He taught his Polish mother to read English and later went on to become a PhD-ed English professor.

By the time I came into the picture, he had begun collecting books. I watched in awe as he constructed book cases in the back yard. He filled aluminum pie pans with water and set them on the hissing radiators in winter to keep the leather bindings from cracking. I watched him use rubber cement to fix loose pages and torn covers. I stood in the eerie red glow of his dark room watching him tong black and white glossies from one pan of chemicals to another.

As I reached double digits my father was drowning in a tide of bills, kids, and politics. Our moments of connection grew sparse, sparks flew, and my attempts at connection were met with anger, or worse, silence, until he disappeared completely.

My father, a man who lived in his mind—a scholar, a reader, a writer—struggled to stay on the shoals of the spectrum and eventually let the cool water pull him under.

His longtime habit of lurking in doorways became more pronounced. In an old photograph, Nana and Uncle Frank are looking at something on the dining room table while he stands in the doorway, hands clasped at his naval, his right foot in the living room.

I remember looking at family photos with his cousin Tommy. Tom pointed to a photograph and said, “See how he is the only one not looking at the camera? He’s like this in all the photos. Your father was a ghost. He’s telling us, ‘I’m not here,’ He was always somewhere else.”

We often stood, each in our own doorway, the room between us tumbling with stacks of books and photographs, shared ideologies, arguments, and accusations, he thinking, “Where did she go?” Me thinking, “You were never really here.”

~*~

If you only have time for one defining memory, what will it be? What if, in a flash, you realize you’ve reached the end and it’s not like in the movies, that your whole life is not going to do a replay behind your closed eyelids? For me, that one defining memory might be this:

Thirty-four years ago, I drove to New Jersey for my Nana’s funeral, walked in, and spotted my father across the room. His eyes met mine, our feet already moving, our arms coming loose. We held each other and drew a long, deep breath.

Twenty steps, a hundred, and everything disappears—the unfinished bathroom, the circular saw on the front porch, the tile saw in the back yard, and the stacks of tile and grout and lumber. Your new reality becomes a distant memory.

It occurs to you that this is last year all over again, and here you are seeking refuge amid the trees again. Last year they took Bob apart, then put him back together, and finally sent him home to recover inch by slow inch until he could walk to the bathroom unaided.

This year your contractor friend, Trip, and his sidekick, Jerry, opened up your floors and sistered in new lumber to make them well again. They tore everything out of the master bathroom and rebuilt it from the subfloor up. A complete re-do requiring ear protection and thrift store sheets over furniture and daily vacuuming.

The trail you made three years ago hardly needs to be marked any longer. You nudge a toe under a fallen branch and flip it into the tangle. No dusting necessary out here, only flinging. You snap off a leafy limb that might have made you duck. Nothing is going to slow you down. You can smell the water in your mind.

When you reach the creek, you listen to it gurgle for a few seconds before stepping onto the rocks. You choose one in the middle and sit facing upstream. So much lazy water. You wonder when the drops sluicing past your rock fell from the sky and how far they have traveled.

You realize you are looking at the flow of time, and you try to imagine what your life would look like rendered as a creek. All those years funneling towards the trickle beside your outstretched feet. The water talks itself over the little gap and spills past.

You stand, turn, and sit facing the other direction. Now you are looking into the future. Water flowing downstream towards the Cape Fear River basin and out to sea. You see a lot of rocks and not much water and you laugh at the allegory. The life ahead won’t be so wide-open easy. You are slowing down, hurting more, remembering less.

The creek turns and vanishes, refusing to tell you what happens next. You sigh and push your body back to standing. Push past your new creakiness, shake off your lofty musings—the justifications and the doubts—and point yourself towards home.

Leaves dance above your head, and you straighten, lengthen your stride, happy to be part of this day. Just another trickle of time to be savored, then released and sent along its way.

She picks up the blue-handled knife and hesitates before slicing this perfect orb in half. It feels like a beheading, or the end of an era. She quarters it and cuts a notch away from each piece at the stem end.

Pulling down two monkey dishes, she fills them with slices. She puts a wedge into her mouth, and using her tongue to trap it between her molars, begins to mash it up. The flavor is magnificent.

She goes to the window and looks out at the tree that bore this perfect fruit, golden leaves at its feet, branches naked and sprawling. Exposed. She looks away in embarrassment. Didn’t those branches have leaves a few weeks ago? How we change from one season to the next.

Searching her memory, she finds images from the day her husband — the man who promised to grow old with her when their hair was still thick and dark — planted this tree. She finds an impression of him digging the hole, and tries to remember helping him place the sapling, gently, into that hole.

It occurs to her that humans have only one spring, one summer, one fall, and if they’re lucky — or not, depending on your perspective — one winter. Unlike the trees, humans do not drop their leaves and grow back new ones. Instead, they continue down the same linear path from cradle to grave.

She sets the other dish next to her partner and watches him reach for this last slice of summer. “Is it spring yet?” he asks on cold mornings. “I hate winter,” she says, tugging on a pair of black fleece loungers.

My mother was in good company, I’d noticed, as I scanned the eight obituaries ahead of hers on Fogelsanger Bricker’s website, all dated within a week of her death. “Is it always like this for you?” I’d asked the funeral director. “No,” he said, “it’s been crazy around here.” He stopped short of saying that business was booming, or worse that people were dying to get their obituaries posted.

On the day before her funeral, Bob and I flew to Philly, rented a black Dodge Charger, and drove to Shippensburg. The next day dawned crisp and clear, gorgeous weather for a burial. We parked next to Our Lady of Visitation Church in the coned lane behind a silver hearse and I began hugging family we’d not seen in two years.

Hesitant to enter the church, I’d hung outside making small talk with the man from Folgesanger. “What kinds of things happen at funerals?” I asked. He crossed his arms across his brown jacket and blinked behind his sunglasses. Undeterred, I continued. “The worst thing you can do at a wedding is throw up on the altar. What’s the worst thing you’ve seen at a funeral?”

“Well, there was this one time where the ex-wife of the deceased got up and said some really bad stuff”

I leaned in for more.

“She was screaming at her ex-husband’s new wife, yelling, ‘You killed him!’ You killed him!’ Out of control! Everybody got worked up.”

“Good lord!” I said. “So, do you carry a stun gun?”

“No,” he chuckled. “But I have a black belt in Kung Fu.”

“Awesome!”

My brother, Father Joseph, steps confidently into the shade, his white robes swishing with a sound like water over river stone. The gleaming white box, suspended in a sling of wide, green straps does not give him pause. This isn’t his first rodeo.

His sturdy, clear voice draws the crowd like the yellow string on a Crown Royal bag. He has said these words countless times during his thirty-year career but he personalizes them so seamlessly that I feel he is speaking of death for the first time. He does not wince or stutter, and gives no indication he is about to bury his mother.

Father Mark, who has flown in from California, brings a silver pail of holy water. Outside the church he had told me, beaming, that today was Saint Theresa’s feast day and also his birthday. I am humbled he chose to celebrate in this way.

My brother takes the silver sprinkler, dips it in the bucket and shakes it. He walks completely around the casket, wetting all sides, casually placing his shoe on the stainless steel frame to navigate the thin space between this grave and the one at my mother’s feet. My eyes follow the light that dances from the water to the canopy ceiling.

When he is finished, the black belt picks up the flowers and invites us to take one. I pull a long-stemmed rose from the spray. Father Joseph nods at a man in a pair of well-used denims and he enters the canopy to wrestle three metal bars out from under the coffin. He touches a switch to release the handbrake on the lowering device. Slowly, the casket begins to sink. I hear muffled sobs behind me.

I stare at the unwinding straps, while the shiny box slides from view. This would have been way worse if they hadn’t draped the dirt sides in Astroturf. Worn jeans kneels next to one of the straps, applying tension as needed to keep the rig moving straight and true. I am mesmerized, stuck in time, listening to the sniffles and the slow creak, wondering how many times these straps have been coiled and let loose this week, and marveling at how clean they look.

When my mother reaches the bottom, my brother leans forward and tosses in a bright red bloom. I stand up, let go of my rose, and watch it fall.

The first walkers appear on the packed sand, two women ambling towards a shy sun.

Yesterday, as Bob and I celebrated his sixty-third birthday, the nursing staff at Chambersburg Hospital took my mother off the high-flow oxygen apparatus and my brother stepped towards her bed. My father took a place on the other side and tethered one of her hands. My brother held the other and they sat, father and son, waiting for mom to fly away. But she held on, her lungs doing what they have always done, making that slow whoosh and eyaahh that sang to all six of her children while they lived in her womb.

A young couple passes beneath me without even a glance at the giant sand bags tucked around the pylons. The dam has opened. A lone woman with a blanket over her shoulders — her face momentarily brightened by the light of her phone, a woman in salmon, a pair of women — one in black holding a stout mug like a lantern, the other in a pale hoodie — another woman in black, all of them walking into that peachy glow.

I wore a black cover-up over my bathing suit yesterday during a long, eastward stroll with Bob. It wasn’t anything I would wear in public, but I’d brought it for comfort and it was handy. After some deliberation, I pulled it on. I have never worn black on a beach before.

We had nearly reached the end of the beach, when I saw my doppelganger — a silver-haired woman in a loose, black dress. She was tanned and long-limbed and I watched her bend easily to flip a shell at her feet. I took a few more strides before veering towards her. I had made up my mind. I must speak with this woman or live with regret.

She was younger than me, her hair was longer, and she wore a golden smile. Our idle talk masked a shimmering connection. We parted and when we saw her later, she told her friend, “Camille is my twin!”

Covid has kept us from random encounters like this, highlighting the importance of casual conversation with strangers. But here, at the edge of the earth with the breeze and slapping water we are freed up for small talk.

Mom rallied all day yesterday, talking on the phone and receiving visitors, while breathing low-flow oxygen. When James and Kathryn appeared at the door to her room, she greeted them with a bright, “I don’t feel like I’m dying!” Then James handed Mom his phone so she could sing Happy Birthday to Bob, and I told her about the beautiful ocean and how grateful I was to her for teaching me to swim. “You held my hands and told me to kick,” I said, and she giggled.

But she grows uncomfortable this morning and the nurses begin giving her morphine. She lays on her side asleep as her sons and their spouses gather, taking turns saying goodbye. Finally, shortly after noon, my mother takes her last breath.

The dog walkers appear at the same time the horizon births the sun, round and orange and so bright I have to look away. Bob snaps away, catching the glory of a new day and filing it away in pixels. The woman with the mug and her young companion return with the sun on their backs. A clacking grackle lands on the white gutter above us, black against the blue sky, and then against all odds, the beach is completely empty.

“How long do you want to live?” Bob asks over a steaming bowl of fried cabbage on our shaded back porch. My eyes wander upwards, my tongue chasing a piece of fried food. “I’d like to make it to eighty-five,” I say, placing my bowl on the wooden table to my left.

“That’s what I was thinking, too.”

A few feet away, two hummingbirds face each other in a waggle dance. “They must be courting,” Bob says.

“I like the way the sun filters through their cute little tails.”

“That way I’ll only have to make it to eighty. Or seventy-nine and a half.”

“No, wait,” I say, struggling with the math.

The perfect scenario involves painless, simultaneous death. Maybe we should believe in The Rapture. What a great way to go, just lift off and ascend into another reality. A reality in which the ditch doesn’t need mowing, and dinner dishes don’t keep appearing in the kitchen sink. A world without friction, pain, or worry. Silent bliss.

Bob and I believe in nothing after death. Not heaven, which frankly sounds terribly boring — all needs met, no hard surfaces, no problems to solve. We prefer the notion of nothingness.

Not life after death. Just nothing. Complete and utter nothing, same as before we were born. No memory, no brain whirring away, no sensations. No guilt for the ones we leave behind to sweat it out.

We finish our dinner and go back inside. Bob turns the A/C back on, and I wash the dishes. I wipe my hands on the towel that hangs off the oven handle while he pulls down the movie screen and fires up the Roku.

We’re still on the bus, still tooling along towards wherever it is we’re going. If all goes as planned, we’ll arrive at our stop before things get really ugly.