Case History: Anna Agrees to an Autopsy
Image: Biodiversity Heritage Library. San Ignacio, Belize, AD 2002
Anna opens her eyes. Her great-great-granddaughter is inches from her face. Always with the Eskimo kisses, this one!
“Please,” Anna scolds. “Not so close, Francie.”
The child is oblivious to rebuke. “Love you, Grauma!”
“Go away now,” Anna tells her, even though what she really wants is to say, Your love is small compared to my love for you, Francie. I love you more than my own daughter. But it would delight the child too much to hear these things. There would be painful hugs. Not to mention Anna’s own, less-loved daughter is in the room. Anna can see the shape of her, hazy and dark, like a shadow behind a curtain. She’s not so bad, fat Samantha, just old, too old for a daughter. What she hates in Samantha is only Anna’s own stubborn living. When a daughter is past ninety, the mother should be dead!
Also in the room is Francie’s mother, who is Edith, or maybe Ellen. If she is Edith, there was also an Ellen, perhaps a cousin who died? Next to her, standing in the doorway, is a man Anna doesn’t know. He looks like Anna’s first husband, her little night-bird, who, two, three, four. The next morning, she wept, hard and painful, her lungs and forehead burning. The doctor said she would kill herself, crying this way, so she began to cry inside herself only, her body growing fat with tears. Then she met Second Husband, who kissed away her heaviness and gave her all the babies she could handle, plus two more.
