EPILOGUE: A WORD ABOUT LIVING (AND DYING)

“Alex,” my father would say, “we are born alone and we will die alone,” and I would roll my eyes in semi-mock tedium when he said this. But when he did die, unexpectedly, it was indeed alone. Perhaps the only expected part of his sudden death was the fact that it was so singularly lonesome, a fulfillment of the prophecy he’d intoned to me so many times before. This was how he was always going to go out, after all. His last moments were spent by himself inside the house where we’d lived as a family—until divorce and college and adulthood made it so there was no real family unit left to speak of.

The mailman found him (a fact that I thought he would relish from the hereafter with comic irony), a foot soldier of the same corps his own father belonged to. As far as my father had come—as many miles as he’d put between himself and small-town America, and its rhythms and customs—it was a representative of that world, where things were delivered by hand and neighbors knocked on doors regularly, who ushered him out. As depressing as this was, I think it would have made him happy.

In the days after he died, there were phone calls and emails, too many white flowers, a few handwritten notes and text messages, all expressing a certain amount of shock and sadness, but also regret. “We hadn’t seen each other in so long!” one said. “I always wondered how he was doing,” wrote another. “We’d always ask each other—have you seen Carl?”

It was clear that so many people my father had known for the definitive years of his life—which is to say, his life when he lived it largest and most fully—had become, however inadvertently, estranged. My father was proud and angry and could hold a grudge. Even the best of his friends would remark on the combustible nature of their friendship—“No risk, no reward!” was essentially their calculation—and he had, especially in his later years, allowed his various frustrations and indignations to isolate him.

There were people he saw in passing, of course: neighbors with whom he shared gardening tips or dry cleaners with whom he engaged in casual political talk, a handful of people he’d meet for a drink or for lunch. But his community—the ones who remembered his fight on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in 1980, or could recall the hotshot organizer from the McGovern campaign—the men and women who had defined his world, who knew him intimately, and who had understood his passions and compulsions and grievances and inspirations? They had, in many ways, receded into the background.

My father became a purveyor of wistful nostalgia about glories past, content to reminisce about who he’d been, rather than repair the relationships that had made him the man he understood himself to be. He was preoccupied with a halcyon construction of What Was, not pushing forward in the present by navigating the necessary ups and downs of love and sadness, disappointment and success. While this may have been an easier way to live, it was also a lot lonelier.

In the days after his death, I thought about this as my lesson: His life had become a homily, a narrative untethered to the here and now. He, like so many others, had forsaken the messiness of flesh and blood for something more addictive but decidedly less real, the myth of who we once were. As it concerned the winding, circuitous path I’d been on for all these days and months, trying to understand who my people were (and where to find them), his death marked an endpoint: not simply to his life, but to the honey-hued family narrative about Iowa corncobs and stickball at sunset, the frozen Mississippi in winter and the decency of the lone black dry cleaner in town.

This was the end of the fable about our people in the heartland. In its place would be something more truthful and less satisfying, a family history that was equal parts comedy and tragedy. I could tell my son about his grandfather (and his great-grandfather!), about what made them interesting and compelling and sometimes terrible, what mistakes they’d made along the way. What was gained and what was lost, where we had come from—specifically—and who had been there before—honestly. What we earned and what we were given. Here was a chance to open a new chapter, this time with the truth. And to live in the world—as difficult and complex and heartbreaking as it is—and not in the past.

As it concerned the other side of my family tree—the branches that began on the opposite side of the world—I had started out this fantastic adventure by speaking with the oldest person I knew, our matriarch, my mother’s mother, Mya Mya Gyi, the Emerald. I was reminded, by virtue of her increasing age, of the brevity of life, the transience of our time on the planet. She was in her late nineties when we began speaking, and it was a race against time to get as much information from her as possible.

With my father, I’d felt (incorrectly, as it turns out) like time was on my side—he had years ahead of him, or so I thought. But with my grandmother, I could feel the sands slipping through the hourglass, the seconds melting away on the clock. Sometimes I even panicked. Who else would have the information she had? Who would remember the things she did about our family? About Burma? Where else could I find a yardstick by which to measure, in all my twenty-first-century earnestness, the bigotries and unresolved conflicts of our family, a standard bearer through which to divine our evolution? Time was running out, and there was so much more to know! It was stressful.

But then, equally so, each time we spoke, I was struck by how much you could pack into a life. That if you were ambitious, somewhat thoughtless, and most certainly brave, your time here would seem very long indeed. (How high the highs of a life well lived, how deep the lows of unresolved mistakes!) She’d seen so much of this world, met so many people; all the diamonds and curries and bowls of piping hot chicken noodle soup she’d had since her very first one in Augusta, Maine, during that first winter in America. She—unlike my father—lived in worlds and worlds and worlds, ones that kept unfolding with each stage of her life. What a seemingly unstoppable thing it was, this kind of existence.

Near the end of my research, she fell sick, abruptly. This had happened before, following a rogue mushroom consumed after an ill-advised foraging trip around northwest Washington (and a subsequent omelet made with said mushroom). But she had survived that, and well, shit, she’d survived so much that she would certainly survive this bullshit phantom illness. Because of course she would.

But no, this time she did not. She grew very weak and stopped opening her eyes to us, and no amount of chicken broth—piping hot or not—would pass her lips. The last thing she said on this planet was not to me, or to my heartbroken, dutiful mother who stood in worried vigil for nearly three weeks. The Emerald was rarely in the mood for emotional generosity or consolation, after all, something we all secretly knew.

It was to my husband, who had stopped in her room late one afternoon, and happened to be wearing a brand-new watch. He appeared in the doorway, and, sensing his presence, she opened her eyes and said, “Good to see you!” as if it were teatime and she wasn’t on her deathbed. He came closer to her and, without looking down, she said to him—the last thing Mya Mya the Emerald would ever say—“Nice watch.”

It was, as far as last words go, completely in sync with my grandmother’s generally insouciant and materialistic existence. It was a statement from the same girl who had, nearly a century before, extorted a Dodge motorcar from her father. She still coveted pretty things, unaware of the turmoil around her. It was cruel, too, in the way that she was and had always been. (Could she not have said it was good to see my mother, or at least acknowledged her daughter’s existence before she passed from her own?) It was selfish. It was, undoubtedly, hilarious. (Especially to my husband. She had always had a way with men.)

It was also beside the point. This was what I realized only after the fact, when this whole project was completed: She wasn’t thinking of last rites or leaving us with some Epic Final Thought, because for her, there was no last of anything. There was no reliance on dim memories: There was only the making of new ones. And all of this, her Buddhism taught, would continue—until nirvana had been reached.

I wasn’t a devout Buddhist, but I, too, had come to the realization that our story—which was necessarily her story—continued. My grandmother didn’t need to say something profound that day, because it wasn’t, actually, the final word on anything. She may have been done on this earthly world, but her children and her children’s children (and their children!) were still alive. She wouldn’t know where we’d end up or how the story would change, what twists and turns might await her family—but she wasn’t worried.

It was up to us.