Purgatory

Once she hit her 90th birthday, it became real to her that death was looming closer, certainly within the next few years. The tunnel of her life was coming to an end and she inched nearer to that bright white light day after day. It had been that way for all humans since the beginning of time, but the reality of the end of her life did not truly hit her until 89 years had passed. 

She wondered regularly now what would happen when she died. She questioned if heaven was actually real as promised through her devout Catholicism or if she would find out at the last second that her religious practice and humble subservience was for a mirage. She thought of all of her loved ones that were already gone: her parents, grandparents, siblings, husband, one miscarried baby, and about what she would do if she really did join them again in a heavenly eternal afterlife. She found that there were people in her memory that she would not necessarily want to see again. 

Her own life had eased after some of their lives ended, particularly that of her late husband. Six decades of marriage and ten living children eroded any semblance of their original innocent relationship. Ten years ago, at the end of his life, they were perpetually resentful of one another. They argued and shouted at each other while babysitting their youngest granddaughter. They separately distracted themselves with music and games to while away the hours they had to spend together. 

Those were supposed to have been the happily retired twilight years of their long lives, but they rarely enjoyed it. There was too much going on, too many adult children and young grandchildren and birthday parties and volunteer church events. The only place they’d managed to vacation in the last 3 decades was Florida, where a handful of their children had fled to from their native suburban Wisconsin. 

When she paused to think about herself as a mother, doubts piled up like toy wooden blocks: she could not have been a good mother if they wanted to get that far away, thousands of miles across the country. The cost of long-distance phone calls at the time dissuaded them from keeping in close contact, so they sometimes drifted apart. 

Even after all these years, she still didn’t know how to adequately divide herself into equal parts for each of them. She knew that they needed her, but 10-to-1 was an overwhelming ratio. There was never enough of her to go around. Instead, she resolved to at least pray for each of them equally. They received one prayer per child, spouse, and grandchild during her morning and night prayers to God. She fingered her rosary as she prayed quietly for their safety and harmony and even for specific things when she knew they were coming up, like Christopher’s birthday or Amy’s ballet recital. A large white magnetic calendar on the side of the refrigerator was relied on to detail out every event of every day of every month. 

She prayed the most when her daughters or daughters-in-law were pregnant, counting down the days of each trimester, for the health of them and their babies. A terrifying miscarriage followed by her very last baby in her mid-forties kept her vigilant about that time in a woman’s life. It was often joyful but she knew that it could turn serious and deadly all too quickly. 

It boggled her mind to quantify the number of babies that had come into this world because of her. Every grandchild one of her daughters produced was once inside her as an egg in her ovaries. Cataloging each of these people in her prayers was one of her main daily activities.

She also had a mental map of where she thought they were at any given time. At home nearby was an elder daughter that married and stayed in their hometown but engaged in an illicit affair on the side. Several of her daughters had dalliances with a first marriage that culminated in divorce and quick re-marriage to someone new. 

This further complicated the family tree. There were branches in all kinds of places, like where another elder daughter got pregnant as a teenager and put her baby up for adoption. That child is always on her mind, but she doesn’t know where to place her on her mental map. Where is she now? Hovering on the edge of her vision with no permanent home on the map. That granddaughter will likely someday produce her own children, exponentially increasing the shadow branch of the family tree. 

She would never truly know how many people would live out their own individual lives on the planet because of her. That made her feel like the original mother of the human world, Eve. She damned them all when the serpent tempted her desire to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. She wanted more for her life, she wanted both the perfect paradise and the knowledge, but she ended up with all of these people instead.

When the granddaughter she called her best and dearest friend asked to interview her for a family history project, she agreed to do it. She didn’t fully understand what was going on, but she participated anyway. She politely answered every question her granddaughter had. She was cute as a button, this girl of just 18. On her laptop was a photo of her and her boyfriend. Their young love made her hopeful for the future. These intelligent, interesting and talented little beings would be a part of her legacy here on earth. 

Their family tree grew more robust with each passing year. Every once in a while, she thought about how many people would attend her funeral. Even more than the large group that showed up to celebrate her 90th birthday. She knew she was a lucky woman to have all of them in her life, but sometimes she wished she were their aunt rather than their Eve, the mother of them all. It was too much, this clan. It was overwhelming. They enumerated enough for a small rural village population.

There were so many moments of joy to remember fondly. The weddings, the births, the new families formed out of theirs. The millennium bought even more of them. At this point she had seen 9 full decades of birth and death. It was still too much, this clan. It was even more overwhelming. But there was no way to go back so they forged ahead.

Big and better and more was the message perpetuated in their American consumerist culture, and their family flourished. Booms and busts and wars and recessions and elections and then 9/11 two months before her husband died of cancer in their home. 2001 was one of the worst years. She could chart them on a line graph, one year after another of ups and downs based on its big events. No one else could tell this family story like she could. She felt her pride swell as the mother of them all, their Eve. 

The family reunion was to be held at the lake house of her nephew, her brother- and sister-in-law’s son. He was some kind of big shot professionally and had a grand piano in his glass-walled living room. She fantasized about walking into his house and sitting down to play her heart out at that gleaming black onyx beauty. That was the way she wanted to be remembered, bold and vibrant and musical but she knew that she did not have the guts to do it in front of all of them. It was always too much, this clan. It was still overwhelming. 

The night before the reunion, she dreamed of the future. Her family was gathered around watching a video of her, the family history project that the granddaughter had put together. She was on the screen talking about her life, their family, the legacy that she left me behind. She watched them watch her like a ghost in purgatory.

In the dream, they reacted and laughed and cried and start to tell their own stories about her. Some of them were not so forgiving in their delivery. They made her sound controlling and angry. They tallied their misbehaviors and disappointments. They retroactively lamented that they didn’t spend enough time with her, that they wished they would have been closer while she was still alive, while there was still a chance. They had wanted more of her.

It was always going to be too much, this clan. It was overwhelming, even in dreams, even in death. This is not how she wanted to be remembered. She tried to wake herself up from the purgatory dream, but it just would not end. She was their Eve, the mother and grandmother and great-grandmother they all remembered, and she marched straight ahead into the bright white light at the end of the tunnel of her life.