07.09.05 - 11:18 p.m.

We are standing in my late aunt�s living room staring at the bookshelves full of teapots that flank the ancient television. Teapots and silver-covered babyshoes and mediocre books and gigantic flower vases in blue and green, and on and on and on. My mother explains for the forty-seventh time that she plans to invite each of my aunt�s friends to take a teapot tomorrow as a remembrance of Susie when they join us for our lesser version of an old-fashioned Irish wake, then asks us if there is anything in particular that we would like, anything with sentimental value. My brother uses this as an opportunity to announce his interest in the printed and scanner.

I groan and roll my eyes, but he can�t figure out why I�m put-off by his weird and inappropriate greed. I remind myself that he is only 18, and that his memories of this house � which my grandfather built, in which my grandmother and aunt Betty lived along with Susie for many, many years � are less potent than mine. I visited more often than he ever did, and remember many people from this house who died well before he was born.

The house is as filthy and cluttered as a house can be. Susie smoked, so the walls have a dingy brown film of nicotine over what is almost entirely ancient paint. The curtains are probably all older than I am, and they too are dingy from smoke and covered in a layer of cat and dog fur. Perhaps layers. As we sift through Susie�s (and grandmother�s and Aunt Betty�s) things, we find some treasures, such as the letter my great-grandparents wrote to my grandmother (then their future daughter-in-law) after she wrote to them in 1943 announcing that she and my grandfather planned to marry. My great-grandmother avowed as how she never thought that Bill, my grandfather, would ever get married because she loved him more than most people are ever loved. My great-grandfather, in contrast, recommended his son to my grandmother as the best fisherman in the county and a good judge of a fighting rooster to boot.

We don�t get around to cleaning out a house without a funeral, of course. Susie died at 1:00 a.m. Wednesday morning, well before we arrived � obviously. My mother keeps telling me that her grandmother suffered a stroke at age 90 and lived another five years in misery, but I�ve never liked the lessons people learn about alleged suffering from their observations of people who died fifty years ago. At the same time, it all now seems inevitable. The abdominal CT Susie had last March showed evidence of tumor implants in the omentum, which was probably the general source of the ascites. I don�t know if Susie understood what that meant � had she understood, she might have presented for evaluation and treatment of the ascites sooner than last Saturday and paid more attention to her symptoms. Had she not presented to the ER and received the morphine, she would not have had the stroke.