Angela Patten

My nine-year-old granddaughter jumped into bed with me one morning while my husband was out in the kitchen making coffee. We could hear him rustling cups and coffee filters in the distance. “You should really get a cat, Granny,” she announced, “because you’re going to be lonely when Grandpa dies and you don’t have anyone to sleep with.”

I was taken aback for a moment but I quickly realized that this advice was intended kindly. After all, she still slept with a mountain of soft toys or “stuffies”—owls, penguins, bears and rabbits. But I found myself musing on mortality more than usual that day. What would it be like to view death as merely a fact of life without the religious trappings of my priest-ridden past and the existential crisis at age seventeen when I suddenly saw through it all and felt bereft in the universe?

Although I knew better, I couldn’t help but wonder if Grandpa might come back to visit from behind that outermost wall.  Maybe there was a loophole somewhere? But when I asked him, he looked fainly amused. “I don’t think so,” he said gently.