22: Alabama

If I spoke at my Grandmother’s funeral, I would read from the Book of Numbers. As everyone there bowed his or her head in silence, I would begin:

“And the Lord spake unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tabernacle of the congregation, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they were come out of the land of Egypt, saying, ‘Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the number of their names, every male by their polls; From twenty years old and upward, all that are able to go forth to war in Israel: thou and Aaron shall number them by their armies. And with you there shall be a man of every tribe; every one head of the house of his fathers. And these are the names of the men that shall stand with you:’”

And then I would list the long-dead names one by one.

And when I said: “According to the number that ye shall prepare, so shall ye do to every one according to their number,” I would mean: These are the rituals by which we remember.

And when I said: “May the Lord bless you, and keep you. May the Lord let his face shine on you and be gracious to you. May the Lord show you his face and bring you peace,” what I meant would be obvious.

My mother, sister, and brothers would be there at the funeral, and who knows what they would say, what they would think of this.

My Grandmother lived for nearly nine decades, her life spread across two centuries and six generations, through several states. I was going to visit her this weekend but she died on Wednesday of last week, so instead I’m going to her wake.

For the sake of structure, say it happened in Alabama. Say she was born and raised there, and expired in her bed at night, alone.

Say she lived in a small town called Antrim, a once-fine, now half-deserted place up in the Appalachians, with one foot in grave and the other in the wilderness, its population almost too low to be counted, too small to map, too insignificant to list.

But I know that there is no such thing.

The Book of Numbers begins as a census taken in a desert - but that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. It is a record of a people, at a place and in a time. And while I don’t believe in any god or bible, I do believe in this:

Eternal life as a series of letters and numbers, characters pressed into paper, etched onto brass, carved into stone, endlessly reread and rewrote and respoken.

As long as we keep count, the dead are not gone and not forgotten.

Everyone can live forever.

Nobody dies alone.

If I told her story it would be a census.

If I wrote a book of numbers, it would look like this.