The Undertaking
“It seemed a useful bit of information for handicapping insurance policies, timing regrets, tendering farewells to former lovers. I wanted some precision in the calculation—if not the day, then possibly the age at which I’d cease to be, at least so far as those around me were concerned.
The gene-pool was unclear on this. The men in the family had all died of hearts: congested, infarcted, occluded, spent—all of their ends had proceeded from their chests, mostly in their sixties. My mother’s fathe...r, a great bingy man, died in my childhood, a narrow memory now of a bald man telling bear stories. He’d grown up in Michigan’s upper peninsula around the turn of the twentieth century, come downstate for an education at Ann Arbor, and married, as my grandmother told it, the first woman who’d have him. But Pat O’Hara, though he lived the civilized life in southeastern lower Michigan ever after, would leave his bride, Marvel Grace, every autumn for a month and return to the UP where he’d drink and hunt and fish and make up the stories I remember him telling us, of being treed by bears and wolves and other wildlife we would never see.MoreLess
The gene-pool was unclear on this. The men in the family had all died of hearts: congested, infarcted, occluded, spent—all of their ends had proceeded from their chests, mostly in their sixties. My mother’s fathe...r, a great bingy man, died in my childhood, a narrow memory now of a bald man telling bear stories. He’d grown up in Michigan’s upper peninsula around the turn of the twentieth century, come downstate for an education at Ann Arbor, and married, as my grandmother told it, the first woman who’d have him. But Pat O’Hara, though he lived the civilized life in southeastern lower Michigan ever after, would leave his bride, Marvel Grace, every autumn for a month and return to the UP where he’d drink and hunt and fish and make up the stories I remember him telling us, of being treed by bears and wolves and other wildlife we would never see.MoreLess
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