Post-mortem catalogs

Somehow she got to thinking about her aging parents, how tough it was on them that none of their friends were around anymore, how it kept them imprisoned in loneliness none of us think much about until the years mount up.

And it worried her, not necessarily because she was scared of what was coming in her own life, but because both her aging parents are in it--and she loves them and she doesn't want to lose them, and doesn't want to feel herself alone.

She's a loving grandma already, but young by my estimation, a long ago ex-student. So I told her--this is all on Facebook--that she shouldn't think her mom and dad would ever be gone. When, in church, we sing some old hymns, I told her I hear my mother's voice or actually see my grandpa who shows up whenever we sing "Beautiful Savior," which, I'll grant you, isn't often.

I told her my mother was still down here in the basement looking over my shoulder at what's appearing on the screen in front of me, and my dad shows up too at odd times, odd moments when I often I least expect him.

My dad would not have chosen to die when he did. I'm sure he'd have liked a few more years; but our other three parents all wanted out--or maybe I should say wanted in, all three gifted by the blessed assurance that the world beyond the grave, whatever that might be, was greatly preferable to how they were living at the end.

She responded with a smiley face. I don't know if what I wrote helped much. I sounded sort of animist, I think. But life is an anthology of stories we all experience, and one of them is loss of our parents, the grief we suffer the day we realize there's no buffer between us and the grave.

And then this came.

Barbara says the shoes therein aren't bad at all, and the banner down low says they're all 25% off. What a deal. She doesn't remember ever seeing a catalog from Maryland Square before--odd title since it was sent from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Women's shoes--all the way through, cover to cover.

Came to our address, but that's not strange. We get more sales catalogs than anything else in the mail these days. You can't help but wonder, you know, how the post office stays afloat. 

There's some big sizes inside, I guess, sizes my mother-in-law might have enjoyed looking over, but she's been gone for more than a decade.

This brand new Maryland Square catalog came to someone who in all likelihood never bought anything for his feet unless it had a Red Wing label. I'm quite sure his wife bought whatever dress shoes were in his closet, and that he got into those loafers on Sunday morning without seeing them at all.

Maryland Square came to Barb's dad at our address, where he never lived--women's shoes to retired farmer, now deceased. Did I mention those shoes were on sale?

I could have brought up Maryland Square in that Facebook response, but she was pretty serious about what she was feeling, as we all are. Still, Maryland Square says you don't have to be an animist to believe in a kind of life after death; all you have to be is a consumer. 

And sometimes not even that.