Can't Wait to Get to Heaven

Calling Dena, Palo Alto, California

12:16 PM (10:16 AM Pacific time)

After having spent some time seeing Aunt Elner, Macky came back into the waiting room and sat with Norma. The nurse who had stayed with her had asked if there was anything else she could do, anyone she could call for them, when Norma said, “Oh, Macky, you need to go call Dena. Tell her we’ll let her know as soon as we can about when the funeral…” Then Norma burst into tears again when she heard the word funeral. The nurse put her arm around Norma’s shoulders and tried to comfort her. “I’m sorry,” said Norma. “It’s just so hard to believe…. Go on, Macky, call Dena. I’ll be all right.”

“I’ll have to call collect.”

“Just tell the operator it’s an emergency.”

Macky reluctantly got up and went down the hall again. He hated making this call, the one to Linda had been hard enough. If it had been up to him, he would have waited until they got back home, but he supposed that Norma knew best in these matters. Women seemed to know the rules and regulations about weddings and funerals, but he was not going to make it an emergency phone call. The poor woman was dead; there was no emergency about that as far as he could see. He would just make it a regular collect call. Dena Nordstrom O’Malley was Norma’s second cousin, Aunt Elner’s great-niece. Although she knew Aunt Elner had been old, she like everybody else was totally surprised when Macky told her. News like that was always the last thing in the world she expected to hear. When she put the phone down, she stood for a moment and considered calling her husband, but decided to wait and tell him in person when he came home for lunch. There was no rush; it had just happened and they didn’t even know yet when the funeral would be. She walked over and sat down in the chair by the big bay window and gazed out at the yard, and felt the tears welling up in her eyes and running down her face. The last time she had seen Aunt Elner had been at Linda’s wedding.

Ever since her husband, Gerry, had become head of the psychiatric department at Stanford University Medical Center, and she had started teaching journalism, their lives had been so busy they had not had a chance to get back and visit with Aunt Elner in person. The last time she had talked to her on the phone was just last week. Aunt Elner, who never understood the two-hour time difference between Missouri and California, had called at five AM, all excited. And when Dena picked up, she had said, “Dena, did you know that a watermelon seed can produce a watermelon two hundred thousand times its own weight? Isn’t that something?”

“Oh yes,” said Dena, half asleep.

“And here’s what I want to know. How does that little black seed know to make the outside of the watermelon green and the inside of the rind white and the rest of it red? Can you figure it? How does it know how to do that?”

“I don’t know, Aunt Elner.”

“I guess it’s just one of those mysteries of life, isn’t it?”

Dena had hung up and gone back to bed.

Now, remembering their last conversation, it suddenly hit her just how much she would miss talking to Elner. They had talked at least once a week for the past fifteen years. As Dena sat there and thought more about it, she also realized just how much of her present life and happiness she owed to having known Elner. Dena and her mother had left Elmwood Springs when she was still a baby, and she hadn’t gone back until she was a grown woman, and even then she had not intended to ever go back there. At the time she had been one of the new up-and-coming female network television news reporters. She had only gone back because she had been sick, and needed a place to recuperate. To her, Elner was just a country woman, certainly not very smart, not in the ways that Dena judged people as being smart.

Before Dena had become ill, her first priority had always been her career, getting ahead, chasing after success and money. It had never even occurred to her that anything else was important, and so a woman who lived in the most humble of circumstances and seemed content to do so was an enigma to her. Having lived ten years in New York City, Dena couldn’t believe the woman never locked her doors, didn’t even own a key to her own house, and Elner was the first person she had ever met who actually seemed content, and she didn’t understand it. Dena thought that she must be a little simpleminded and her almost childlike fascination with nature was just a lack of sophistication. “God, who could get so excited at finding a four-leaf clover?”

Before she had left New York, Dena had certainly never paid the slightest attention to nature, had never seen a sunset or sunrise unless it had been an accident. She had rarely even noticed the moon or the stars or even the seasons changing, other than switching to heavier clothes. And most of all she was at a loss to understand why anybody would go out of their way to see the same sunrise every morning, and the same old sunset every night. As far as she was concerned, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. But Aunt Elner had explained, “Oh, honey, it’s never the same, every morning it’s an entirely different sunrise, and every night an entirely different sunset, and it will never ever happen in quite the same way again.” And Elner had turned to her and said, “My question to you is, how in the world could you stand to miss even one? It’s better than any picture show and it’s free too.”

It had taken Dena a while, but after joining Elner every evening, sitting with her and watching the sun go down over the fields in the back of her house, she had come to see what Elner had been talking about. Aunt Elner had taught her to look for the tiny green flash that happened just as the sun dipped down into the horizon. The first night she came over and sat out back with her, Aunt Elner had said, “You know, Dena, there’s a secret to watching a sunset, most people think that once the sun goes down, that’s the end of it. They stop watching too soon, because the really pretty part is just beginning.” Aunt Elner had been right, of course, and every night after that they sat in the yard and watched until the last rays faded and until after the sky had turned dark blue and the first star had appeared.

Aunt Elner said, “I just couldn’t go to bed if I hadn’t made a wish on the first star, could you?” Dena had always wondered what Aunt Elner wished for, but when she asked, Aunt Elner had just smiled. “If I tell, it won’t come true, but it’s a good one, I can tell you that much.” Since those days, Dena had come a long way. Aunt Elner had been the one who had first opened her eyes, made her see the things that had always been right in front of her, all the things she had never stopped long enough to look at. Later, she came to realize just how smart Aunt Elner really was, and now she hardly ever missed a sunset. All of a sudden another wave of sadness hit her as she realized what a lonely old world this was going to be without Aunt Elner.