Geneva

You were thirty-five when you died, thirty-five when my mother was born. 1955, sixty-one years ago. Another age when a woman taken by a man twenty years her senior was not so unusual. A man of the drink and the carcinogenic speech. The baby he didn't want. Called a miraculous birth, the healthy girl from the dying mother. Four months later and you were gone. It was diagnosed as tuberculosis, an antiquated mislabel for hidden and insidious aberrations carried on like a curse in the blood, the genes. The kind that betrays your own body with attacks on the lungs and the liver. Weapons striking sudden and swift. A few months and the trigger is pulled. Such fragile forms set with unjustified disease to make you sure of His sadism as you are of life itself. Pulmatory fibrosis and emergency transplants and cancer. My uncle, your nephew, sits withered and pale. He sucks on an oxygen tank as we watch, sullen. "Wanna hit?" he says. I smile with him.

You lived in secondhand stories and monochrome pictures. She looks like you, my mother. A stranger to her, a phantom. She spent her youth with another in your stead and the old man's stonewalled remove. They would leave her even before they died without approval and always wanting, in search to fill that absence. To a husband of familiar abuse. Caught in the cyclical yearning for things accustomed, even those most damaged. The hurt seeking the hurt and hurting in kind. But she shed him in time and escaped, eventually, to a man who had his own history of broken homes and failed marriages and they came together alike in pain and in love. Old wounds between them reverberated. Bitterness and rage unearthed like bottomless well water. They wrestled, they fought, but for twenty-eight years their bond has held.

She was thirty-five when I was born. Thirty-five. A decade later than her brothers and sisters. Their children already at adulthood while I was slouching through my teenaged years. We endured, separately, the strain of death and of the deaths to come. Death of every day wasted and fulfilled. Counting down, counting up. Hope seems to dwindle, that blessed assurance beyond the veil of the flesh and illusion that so thoroughly convinces because it is, nearly, all we know. Now we search like intrepid historians for you and the answers locked away. Paperwork, records of life. What really killed you and if it is still with us, me and mom. Her blood and body will be examined, as will mine if the results are bad. So that our days might be numbered more accurately. She never knew you, and neither did I. But our lives are linked inextricably. The paths we walk have already been tread. The choices we make already made by those that have come before, even if we don't want them to. I hope one day we will meet each other. I hope we will be healthy and rejuvenated somewhere where there is no disease or hereditary mutation to make us suffer without cause or reason. I hope that there we can understand why these things are in the world. Or maybe we'll find the purpose won't matter at all. Maybe it doesn't now, here in this place. I don't know. Do you?