Now she is free

Yesterday we laid our cousin Pearl to rest. Those of you who have been here for a while might remember Pearl, my Aunt Winnie's daughter, who struggled her whole teenage and adult life with addiction. Pearl isn't her real name. She breathed her last breath a few weeks ago, having never escaped the snare of drugs and alcohol. Her health and mobility got really bad toward the end, so that when the hospital called to say she was gone, my sadness was leavened with relief. I thought, Now she is free.

The Virginia cousins, including Pearl’s son, arrived Friday night for yesterday’s service, with Pearl's ashes in a beautiful urn our cousin Winsome picked out. Pearl's son was raised with his aunt and uncle and their two boys in Fairfax, Virginia, and now he was back in the city of his birth to bury his mother. All the New York cousins were there, too, for the service at our little country church in Harlem. We held a repast afterward in a community room on the campus where we live, and we all sensed that wherever she was, Pearl could feel our love, simpler now than it had been in life, pure. We all celebrated that she had been here with us, never mind that her years had been so troubled, that she sorely tested some of us sometimes. She was still ours. And now she has shuffled off this mortal coil, having had the experiences and learned the lessons she likely came here to master, what do we know of this, after all, and now—I feel this deeply—she is at peace. 

My son and daughter were with their cousin, Pearl's son, above center, and with others of the younger generation of cousins, below.

Last night, when everyone else had gone home, and our Virginia family were on the road back to Fairfax, our daughter said to her dad and me, "The only problem with having a big family, and loving lots and lots of people, is that it means there's a lot of loss in your future." I remember when this realization came to me, too, some years ago. "It's still better to love," I said, holding her. "As for loss, the way I deal with that is I just get there when I get there, and I don't keep score."