Chapter 2 Accepting Death Speaking of forever, the departed family members, Grammy, Pappy, and Arlene, seem to be an all encamping theme for the writer, mixed with thoughts of his own pending demise. Bob has a saying, the first 100 years of a person’s life is the hardest. I try not to stew on that one too long. He has dissected the meaning of death into the lowest denominator. He just can’t, no matter how hard he tries, wrap his mind and thought process around the death issue… He finally concluded that he could work through the tormenting and haunting thoughts by other means. You could say it has had a profound effect on his rational logic. I know this first hand. I to, have feelings of despair and neglect. One day Bob asked me while pondering out loud, “How can it be, when someone lived, married, and bore a son into a cold-dark lonely world, they could all of a sudden be taken in their sleep? Gone forever, leaving behind an 18-month-old boy without so much as a good by? God, I pray, reveal to me how that could be part of your all-encompassing will.” The only remnants from that person’s life now lay on top of a weathered oak dresser along with a few half-empty cologne bottles sitting on a tarnished tray. Through a crack in his mom’s bedroom door, I watched Bob spritz honeysuckle mist from one of the bottles to the back of his hand, inhaling it with a long-g gasp and holding it there as waiting for some forth-coming revelation… evidently, there wasn’t any? Then he noticed a hairbrush laying bristles up on the dresser, a few tangled auburn curls sway in the reflective air... also a few dog-eared black and white photos which were taken before his birth stick in the crack of the mirror frame, as such, bore an uncanny resemblance to him. Suddenly, his face flushed red with rage. He turned, slammed his fist into the wall fracturing both plaster and hand. “Ouch.” Then he stomped the floorboards 3 or 4 times while snarling out-loud, graphic content about life not being fair. At this point, I slipped quietly away, across the hall to my room. Chapter 3 The Dig