My grandfather died two weeks ago, a few months short of his
89th birthday, in the same room where he was born. Most every night of his long
life, he slept under the same roof, in the farmhouse where his parents had settled
just after their marriage.
Historically speaking, this kind of stability is unremarkable.
But in modern America, where the average person moves 11.4 times in a lifetime,
it would be difficult to compute just how rare it is. My eldest son, who just
turned eight, has already lived in four different homes, in three different
states.
My grandfather also died a farmer, as had his father before
him, and his grandfather before him, back as far as the records go. We tucked
wheat stalks and an ear of field corn into the floral spray on his coffin. The
photos lined up at the back of the funeral home showed him on his tractor and
standing in the barnyard with the Angus steers. There was a sign from Esskay,
which bought his beef for decades, and an aerial photo of the farm.
He’d only foresworn the tractor two years ago, when a fall
from the step landed him in the hospital for a few weeks. He continued to
supervise the work done by others and to check the grain prices regularly. I
saw him in the hospital a few days before his death, when the medicine was
making his mind a bit foggier than usual. He looked out his window over a vast
parking lot, but what he saw was a rolling field. “That one would be good for
corn,” he told me.
