Within You, Without You

Within You, Without You
Anthony Carter

    It was a cool Saturday morning in March and I had just finished my walk.  It was my usual walk, almost a daily thing.  During this time, I could clear my head and think, but now it was over, at least for the day, and I was home.  But entering the house, I could sense a difference.  Something had changed. 
    Passing my parent’s bedroom, I noticed that the door was closed, but I could hear muffled conversation, and, for a moment, I thought I heard crying.  I stopped and listened.  Leaning against the door, squinting my eyes, and straining my ears, trying to pick out what was being said, I realized that my mother was on the phone crying.  I reached for the door knob, but suddenly pulled back and thought, why is she crying?  Where is Dad?  Has something happened?
    Just then, Dad came up the stairs carrying two suitcases.  I asked him, “What’s going on?  Are you leaving?”  He stopped at the bedroom door and whispered, “Your grandfather died this morning.”  Those words screamed through my ears like a freight train going past.  “What!” I replied in a hushed voice.  My father repeated, “Your grandfather died this morning. He collapsed by his bed,” as he put the suitcases down.  He reached for the bedroom door knob and whispered, “They think he had a heart attack.” With that he opened the door.
    My mother was seated on the bed, with a tissue in her hand and speaking on the phone.  She was talking with my Aunt Gussie, my mother’s sister, who lived with my grandparents.  She had called to tell my mother that she had found my grandfather on the floor by his bed.                                                                                                                           
      He had already dressed for the day.  His pipe was lit and in his hand.  His old hickory walking cane was  lying by his side.  My aunt was telling my mother that the ambulance had been called as well as the police and that members of the family had already started to arrive from all over the county. 
    The town where my grandparents lived is very small.  Half of the town’s population is related to me and the other half knew the family.  We are the Barrineaus of Andrews, South Carolina, a French Huguenot family that has been in Williamsburg and Georgetown counties since 1740, and we have reproduced so well and so often that there were now thousands of us.  My grandfather, John Arthur Barrineau, was one of the most senior members of the Barrineau family, a thin but elegant gentleman with a crisp little mustache and twinkling blue gray eyes.  He was a man from the last century, born on May 1, 1877, during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, into a family still struggling to recover from the ruin of the Civil War.
    Now standing by my parent’s bedroom door with those words still burning in my ears, I was glued to the carpet, unable to move.  “Dead!”  I screamed at my father.  “That wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t die, not now!” I stood in the hallway stunned and thinking. He’s always been there. When I was nine, he taught me to fish and how to make rope out of string! We watched the hummingbirds dance around the lilies near the front gate! We caught fireflies together at twilight, and then I would sit on his lap and watch them glow in a jar! He told me stories about the old days!  In church, he had held my hand as we listened to my Uncle Smitty preach a sermon!  He couldn’t possibly be dead.
    I walked to the bed and leaned over and gave my mother a kiss on her forehead.  She looked up and gave me a weak smile, then continued her conversation with her sister.
                                                                                                                                           
    Gathering up my jacket from where I dropped it on the hallway floor, I walked down the stairs and out the front door.  I had to think this one out. I had to go!
    Tears were streaming down my face by the time I had reached the end of the driveway, not the weak tears that you might cry during a sad movie, but tears like that of a nine-year-old child that just saw his puppy get run over by a car.  The more I walked, the more I cried and when I had I made my way it to the edge of the woods, I was nearly blind with tears. This is something I shouldn’t do. I thought to myself.  All this crying and moaning, I’m too grown up for this.  I’m a freshman in college now.  But I continued walking and crying - stumbling - until reaching a familiar place, the rock ledge that over looked the creek.  That’s where I needed to be.
    More than a mile from my house, it’s a secret place, a place that I have often retreated to since childhood, a place where I could think, wonder and dream.  Today, it would be a place to mourn. Easing myself down on to the ledge, I dangled my feet out over the water that slowly moved passed the rocky ledge.  There I sat and wept in stunned silence for an hour or more, not understanding how this wonderful man could leave us all. Whispering aloud I said, “How could he leave grandmother and all of his nine children and his fifty-seven grandchildren…and me?”
      It was then that an empty feeling flushed over my body.  Thoughts of losing my grandmother, my uncles and aunts, and then my parents blazed through my mind.  Now I understood that this was only the beginning and nothing was ever going to be the same now that the long goodbye had started.  I was destined to see them all leave me.  One by one, their smiles would disappear and their laughter would become silent, and one day I would be alone. 
                                                                                                                         
      I didn’t know that it would be a process that would take over forty years to complete, and ending with the death of my grandparent’s youngest child, my mother. 
    After several hours had passed, I gathered enough strength to stand up and start my journey back home.  The spring winds were picking up; their bite was especially cruel that afternoon.  Stuffing my hands into the pockets of my jacket, I started humming the lines of a Beatles song that I was fond of: “and life flows on within you and without you.”  I discovered that, to me, the words of this song meant that the life that my grandparents and parents gave to me continues on within me and around me and on that cold, cruel spring day, my grandfather was with me on that rocky ledge, just as he is with me today.  They are all here now…in my thoughts and by my side.