Читать книгу The Coffins of Little Hope - Timothy Schaffert - Страница 9

What will you most remember? It’s a question I’ve asked of the grieving hundreds and hundreds of times. The people I ask almost always take a deep breath and exhale. “What will I most remember?” they most always say, looking up and off as they’re thinking back. Their first responses, which come too quickly, simply to fill the silence in the room, are unexceptional: her infectious smile, his playful wink, her bubbly laugh, his gruff demeanor, which disguised his sweet, soft heart. But here’s what I do: I write nothing down. I give them absolutely nothing, as if they’ve not yet said a word. I sit, my skinny legs crossed beneath my long skirt, my steno pad atop my knee, the point of my pen pressed on the paper but not moving, not even to doodle. They know that I know they can do better than that. To please me, then, they see past their grief and breathe vivid life back into their beloveds, in idiosyncratic detail.

What will they most remember about me? Will it be the cherry cough drops I constantly popped and the tart, antiseptic scent they gave my breath and the noise they made knocking against my teeth (my death rattle, my great-granddaughter lovingly calls it)? Because, you see, I’ve always been nervous among all the despair. And the older I’ve grown, the more nervous I’ve become.

Once upon a time, I could ease into a house of mourning as inconspicuously as a neighbor dropping off a coffee cake. An obit writer should not, by nature, be a memorable visitor. But when my crooked shadow falls across the doorstep, people likely think I’ve come grim-reaping. My hair is snow-white, and I’m quite tall, my head only just clearing some of the shorter of the doorjambs, even with an old-lady slouch I’ve had since girlhood. As a gangly teen, I thought it made me lady-like to curl in on myself. I thought it demure to lean forward into invisibility. All the admonishment I took from my concerned aunties for letting my hair fall in my face (flirty-like, one aunt said with disdain) failed to get me to straighten up, but I did take to wrenching it all back into a tight ponytail with silk ribbons, and I do still twist my knotted braids atop my head and riddle them with combs and clips and, my favorite, an ostentatious dragonfly hairpin bejeweled with colored glass. It’s how people know me, for better or worse.