It's hard to know where to start. No clear beginning seems to exist, really.

Grandpa died early last Wednesday. Sometime between one-thirty and three-thirty in the morning. My parents, my aunt jean and uncle jim, his wife of sixty-nine and half years (my grandma), and I were all with him. It's odd. I found tears rolling down my cheeks often as we cared for him in his last few days, rolling him to prevent bed sores, gently dropping melted icecream into his mouth, drop by drop, to provide miniscule amounts of calories, dobbing wet sponges on his increasingly dryer lips. I think my parents saught to protect me from all this, but really it was what I needed most, these opportunities to provide tender care as my Papo slowly slipped from this earth. The day before he died he gained a couple moments of lucidity, the fog of morphine lifting from him, for a moment I saw that familiar shadow back in his eyes, and when I asked him if he was hurting he plainly said, "No, i'm not hurting." As if it was a odd question to be asking him, and then he was gone again, back to his fretful slumber. That night he would slip away in his sleep, my mom walked into my grandma's room where I was sleeping and shook my shoulder, "Daddies gone James." Truthfully I was thankful. I layed there awhile listening to the sobs of my ninety-two year old grandmother, the commotion of her five present children mourning our loss, finally I rolled off my pallet and went to Papo, kissing him on the forehead for the last time. I went back to bed and when I awoke a hour or so later he was gone, already wisked away by the funeral home.

We had his memorial in a grove of idyllic oak trees next to my Uncle Bob's most serene fishing pond. My father and Uncle Byron officiated over the service as fish jumped in the pond, and the sun shone in beams through the ancient arching branches of the oaks. Really, it couldn't have been a better service.

The funeral home delivered Papo in his urn yesterday. A elegant dual box of mahogany, a empty ash vault awaiting grandma in her time. Grandma put his wallet, wedding band and pocket knife in the compartment above his ashes, she grabbed these artifacts in a anxious, frantic kind of way from his pajama drawer like you would if you had your hands in something you would rather not be touching. Then she turned and put her head on my shoulder saying she wasn't sure if she could take it, having his ashes there. She seems more at peace with having his remains so near now.

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We've taken grandma on several day trips. We went to limestone county and spent two days hunting down the gravesite of Sarah Ann (Rowland) Magee, her great-grandmother. Her gravesite was something of family legend, and it was gratifying, to grandma and I, to finally solve the mystery and be able to look upon her resting place with my own eyes. I found a little flowering cactus in among the coral berries of the gravesite and broke off a piece, a kind of botanical heirloom to grow in my garden. We went to Olive Grove church and cemetary, near Axtell, Tx where my grandma was baptised when she was twelve and where most of her imdeiate family are buried. I found iris rhizomes, stunted from having been mowed over so many times, took six heel cuttings from an olive tree, and three rhizomes from a stunning, scented purple Iris growing in the church yard. I like the idea of these green connections to the people of my past growing on in my own garden.