Already

   Do you sing to yourself while you drive? I do, and I look a lot crackpot doing it, too, so when I drive up to a stoplight, I make a point of stopping a few feet back from the line. Whoever pulls up in the next lane won't be able to glance sideways and notice my musical grimacing.

Honora Lynch before her wedding

   Today I was doing this stoplight maneuver while trying to land daintily on the end of a phrase of "What'll I Do" (when you are gone away) when I realized something about the narrator of that song: He already has lost the loved one he's fretting about losing. Already he knows what he will do when she is far away and all he has is the photograph and the dreams that won't come true: because she is gone.

   He's singing about present reality as though it were potential. Is he playing with his sorrow? Is his sorrow self-indulgence?

    Irving Berlin wrote that song in 1923, the year before Mom was born, the year before her father was killed by a drunken driver. Growing up, she listened at night to her own mother's weeping, through the walls of the rooms where she and her siblings slept in the attic of Uncle Eddie and Auntie Minnie's house. My grandfather had been dead for years, and Granny would weep at night. Mom told me she didn't believe anyone dared to talk to her about him during daylight, not wanting her to break down. Mom asked her once, as a teen, and Granny started weeping. "I never asked her again," Mom said.

    I can make myself cry by thinking or talking about Mom's forthcoming death. What will I do when she's gone? But already I know what I will do. I have been doing it for several years already. Why go on talking about it and making myself weepy?

   Everyone I know wants to talk about their dying and/or dead parents. They ask about mine and then tell me about theirs, and often enough, we both cry a little bit. I see small children looking bereft in the eyes of these grownup people.
   Sometimes I wish there was a stoplight I could back off from, just a bit, to help us both avoid it.