The Beans Still Get Cooked

I have been thinking about my great-grandmother Estamady.

She died in 1918, at 45 years old, during the influenza pandemic. She had twelve children.

I stayed up until six in the morning researching her the other night, because apparently that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do when one could be sleeping.

I kept trying to climb inside her life.

Not the life that survives in records.

Born. Married. Children. Census. Death.

Her actual life.

I imagined an ordinary day near the end of it.

There is mud everywhere.

She is tired of the mud. Nobody else seems to care about the mud, which somehow means she has to care about it.

The children have been passing around some kind of sickness. Nothing particularly alarming. Children get sick. Especially with twelve of them passing germs around.

Her head hurts.

She is tired.

But she can’t not be fine.

There are twelve children and a house and a husband who will need dinner because tomorrow he will get up and work another impossibly long day.

Maybe her body feels a little strange.

Maybe she wonders if she’s pregnant again.

Number thirteen.

Oh, God. Maybe again.

Someone tracks mud across the floor she just cleaned.

She closes her eyes.

Head down.

Just for a second.

What is the point of any of this?

You clean the mud and the mud comes back.

You wash the clothes and they become dirty.

You feed everyone and, incredibly, they expect to eat again.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Beans are always cooking.

Rice is always cooking.

She makes dinner.

She keeps moving.

And maybe, after everyone finally settles down, she slips outside onto the porch.

This is the part of her day she likes.

Nobody needs anything.

For just a few minutes, she isn’t Mama.

She isn’t somebody’s wife.

She isn’t monitoring coughs or cleaning mud or wondering if another baby is already quietly becoming inside her.

She sits.

Maybe there’s a moth.

Something utterly ordinary.

She watches it flutter around the light.

How curious, she thinks.

That’s it.

She doesn’t know she is living through a historic pandemic.

Not really.

There has been talk. Newspapers. Sickness. War. Death. Terrible things happening out there in the enormous world.

But here?

There are beans.

There is mud.

There are children with colds.

There is a moth.

And tomorrow there will be all of it again.

Except one day, there isn’t.

That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.

We know when we look backward that Estamady was running out of tomorrows.

She didn’t.

Maybe she was irritated about something completely stupid on one of her last nights.

Maybe she worried about the laundry.

Maybe she planned tomorrow’s dinner.

Maybe she thought she’d clean that damned floor again in the morning.

Because we live as though tomorrow is part of the routine.

How else could we live?

You have to soak tomorrow’s beans.

And then, eventually, Estamady was gone.

I wonder about the first morning without her.

Someone was hungry.

Someone coughed.

There was mud.

Maybe one of the children started to call for her before remembering.

Mama—

Oh.

Someone had to figure out where she kept things.

Someone had to know which child needed what.

Someone had to make dinner.

And somehow, eventually, the beans got cooked.

That’s the strange cruelty of being alive.

You can be absolutely essential to a tiny universe, and when you disappear, the universe reorganizes itself around the hole.

The children keep growing.

The seasons keep changing.

The moths keep circling porch lights.

The beans still get cooked.

More than a hundred years later, one of Estamady’s descendants sits on her own porch.

She has different problems.

Electric lights. Grocery stores. A washing machine. A phone containing nearly all human knowledge. Too many pets. A husband. Children. Work. Bills.

She still gets tired of cleaning things that will immediately become dirty again.

She still sometimes wonders what the point of any of it is.

And when everybody finally stops needing something from her, she likes to sit outside.

She watches small creatures.

She wonders about things.

How curious.

I don’t know whether Estamady ever watched a moth.

I made that part up.

But I know there were moments of her life nobody recorded.

Moments when she wasn’t an ancestor yet.

She was just a woman sitting somewhere inside an ordinary day, assuming there would be another one.

Just like me.

Just like you.

Maybe that’s what I wanted from all those records.

Not to know how she died.

To remember that before she died—

she was here.