Life's Bookends Meet in My Middle Age

Evelyn “Gigi” Carlson knows a secret. A really big one. But the rest of us will just have to wait to find out.

Gigi died last night. She was 97. Having lost all of my grandparents by the time I was in college, I was delighted when I married into her family. She made a mighty nice wedding gift. As did her husband, Harry, a gentle soul who died several years ago.

In her last week, Gigi, a petite woman, somehow managed to get even smaller, her frail body transforming into something both papery and otherworldly. When Mark and I visited her Friday night, her breathing was rapid and shallow, her skin loose and pallid. I held her soft hand and told her I hoped she’d get to go fishing and dancing soon.

For all we know, she’s been waltzing for 24 hours straight.

Oddly, I find comfort in the not knowing. I like that she got to answer one of the Big Questions while the rest of us will just have to wait around and see, thank you very much.

Gigi lived a small life, despite having seen and lived through world wars, automobiles, computers and “Jersey Shores.” Well, I don’t think she’d ever seen “Jersey Shores.”

Which is probably a good thing.

Today, I’ve been thinking about the sizes of our lives, wondering how Gigi’s could be so small, while others seem to stretch from one end of the world to the other. When she was hospitalized a few weeks back, Gigi was haunted by vivid, frightening dreams. More than once, she’d ask us if she was still in the United States. The thought of getting onto an airplane for distant places scared her almost to death.

Like I said, Gigi lived a surprisingly small life. I loved the heck out of her but a part of me always felt sad that so many things frightened her. Where others saw adventure and possibility, she only saw danger.

A small life is much different than a simple one.

And a long life can be lived in just a few, short years.

Take Emily, my friend Erin’s exceptional daughter. About nine years old on paper, when you meet Emily, you feel as though you are in the presence of a mystical village elder. Diagnosed with a disease so rare that only a handful of other U.S. children even have it, Emily is wise beyond her years.

She has lived neither a small nor a simple life.

On Friday morning, my friend Angie brought her newborn son Lukas to school. Cradling him in my arms, just before lunch, who would have guessed that I would have a bookend experience, just hours later, holding another innocent just a day before she gets in on the Big Secret.

I like the mysteries that pepper our lives, even when they break my heart. I like that I can touch new skin packaged in a fat, happy, tiny body, only to bury my nose, hours later, in the scent of a life diminishing.

It is at once both humbling and life-giving.