My father, George, used to tease me about it.
“Other people watch television, Claire,” he’d say. “You investigate dead relatives.”
“They’re usually more interesting,” I’d tell him.
“Certainly quieter,” my mother would add from the kitchen.
Dad would laugh. “You should try researching living relatives sometime.”
“Why? The living ones are the ones who keep asking me for favors.”
“Like helping your mother with her garden?” Mom would say.
“Exactly. Those dead relatives never ask me to pull weeds.”
Dad would chuckle and shake his head.
“See, Eleanor? Our daughter has her priorities straight.”
“For once,” Mom would say, and smile at me over her glasses.
We had that same conversation a hundred times. Every Sunday dinner, practically. It was one of our little family songs. Everybody knew their part.
I didn’t know then how much that joke would come back to haunt me.
Dad died a year ago. In March.
Heart failure. He was eighty-seven. He’d been sick for about a year before that, slowly, the way old men get sick. Shorter walks. Longer naps. More pills in the little plastic box with the days of the week on it.
He and Mom had been married sixty-one years.
They were both teachers. Dad taught high school math for thirty-eight years. Mom taught third grade for forty-one. They met in the teacher’s lounge at their very first school in 1961, when Mom spilled coffee on Dad’s lesson plans and he said, “Well, that’s one way to grade them.”
They were the kind of couple who finished each other’s sentences. Who held hands in the grocery store. Who argued about the crossword puzzle every single morning for sixty years and never once got tired of it.
After Dad died, my mother barely left the house.
“Come to church with me Sunday, Mom.”
“Not this week, Claire.”
“You said that last week.”
“And I’ll probably say it next week.”
“Mom…”
She looked at me over her teacup. Steady. Gentle. Immovable.
“I’m eighty-five, sweetheart,” she said. “Let me be stubborn.”
I let her. I didn’t know what else to do. I’d drive over three or four times a week after school, bring her groceries, sit with her while she watched her game shows. She’d stopped doing the crossword. That was the thing that scared me most. Sixty years of crosswords, and she just stopped.
“It’s not as fun without someone to be wrong,” she said, when I asked her about it. 