When I’m Dead and Gone

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Actually, and among other things, I coveted a bowl. A small, simple Cantonese bowl of white porcelain painted blue with a leafy geometric design that crept up the sides to its scalloped rim. The bowl sat on the melodeon in the upstairs hall, beneath a mirror, illuminated by an overhead light. Inside the bowl rested a leather-bound Bible and Temple's notes on Shakespeare, a shrine to the original owner of these objects, Nancy Cooper Slagle. "The cousin of the great James Fenimore Cooper," my grandmother would say proudly—as if we owned him. "And the bowl is very rare. One of a kind." It was china from China, she said, the real McCoy. It reached back into our family six generations to the Civil War—It was the oldest treasure she possessed—and she loved to tell its story.

Nancy was my grandmother's great-grandmother, a tiny woman no taller than 4 feet, 10 inches. She was from Cooperstown, New York, but left at the age of 16 to study theology in Virginia, where she fell in love and married James Slagle. He became chaplain of the Libby Prison in Richmond, where he contracted amoebic dysentery and died, leaving Nancy a penniless Yankee in the confederate South with six children and an infant. "Intrepid," as my grandmother described her, Nancy walked more than 200 miles, her children in tow, to the safety and resources of her husband's family in Gallopolis, Ohio. The trip took many weeks; they had to eat off the land and rely on the generosity of strangers. The infant died of malnutrition as they crossed the Alleghenies, but eventually the rest of them made it.

At this point in the story, my grandmother would tell me that the only things Nancy carried from her old life were Temple's notes on Shakespeare, the leather-bound Bible, and the Cantonese bowl, which had been a wedding gift.

Nancy gave the bowl to her son Albert, who gave it to his daughter Glenna, who gave it to my grandmother Thelma, who gave it to me. I see the bowl as a baton carried forward and passed on in a relay of ancestors, a relic linking us to one another, to the past and to the future.

My grandmother died at 91 of heart failure. It had been her ambition to live to be 106, the age of her oldest female ancestor. But on a very hot August day, her heart started to give out. We had her zipped off by helicopter to a big hospital for an emergency angioplasty. "I don't know what a helicopter has to do with my heart," she said at the time, "but I trust you."

I'd been hearing that question— "What would you like when I'm dead and gone?"—for 30 years. Now she lay dying on a stretcher in the big hospital, and I held her hand as her heartbeat faded.

Not long after she died, I started going to flea markets. I found them sad because they represented so many lives gone by. Possessions once treasured were now for sale, their stories lost. Just objects, no history. I started noticing little things—marble-topped end tables, an ottoman, chairs, china, a Cantonese bowl.

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