CityView Magazine

10 | April 2019 H M C F A D Y E N ' S M U S I N G S The Cornbread Skillet BY BILL MCFADYEN H earing of Mamma's death was nothing like when Granddaddy died. Riding in the backseat on the way to the coast to fish for Spanish mackerel, I had heard my uncle tell his fishing buddies that Granddaddy would live a normal life aer having received a lung cancer diagnosis. To them, that meant that he would not seek any treatment – that 84 years was enough for Granddaddy to call it a life lived. I was then 12 years of age and it sounded to me like he had been cured. So when Mom came into my room that morning before school to tell me my hero had died, I was shocked proportionate to the heart-brokenness. My Grandmother's death six years later was different. I was a college student. Cancer was a very clear demon. e persistent pain evident in her face while she lay in the bed before I went back from Christmas break begged for ultimate relief. Grimacing, she told me something during that final visit that I will never forget. Facing the completion of her own 84 years, she said resolutely that she had no regrets. Eighty-four years old, dying of intestinal cancer and no regrets? Heck, I was 18 and already had regrets. No regrets? I even questioned her about it with a certain incredulity. She had been shot in the face in an accident when in her twenties. She had an infant son to die a couple of days aer his birth. She had a brother who died pretty young from his own bad habits. She watched her husband of 50-plus years waste away in the same fashion in which she was now expiring. She was lying there fighting through the delirium of constant pain to talk to me – to say goodbye. Still, she was cogent and resolute when she told me, "I don't regret anything that has happened in my life." ose happenings, fortunate and unfortunate, were her life. Even facing her mortality, she would have changed none of it. I studied some philosophy at Davidson College. (Well, "study" may be an overstatement – but I was certainly exposed to some.) at last bit of wisdom that Mamma imparted to me was much clearer than anything about which Dr. McCormick lectured. For her, the good and the bad each have their place in what we become and in the life we are granted. So that phone call a few weeks later that Mamma was gone came with no shock. It set in motion what I now call "e Business of Death." You lose the person and then you start the business of bringing an end to what was a life as we know it. When can everyone make it home? When should we hold the church service and who will line up the pallbearers? Who will get the death certificates? In the moment, e Business of Death takes precedent over mourning the loss. e mourning will come, but not right then. e years – the decades especially – steal my clarity. I do not remember if we McFadyens and Bartons gathered at her house aer the funeral or on some later date. Logic tells me it must have been later because it takes time to wind down a house from being lived in to being divested. But gather we did with the intent of everyone getting their desired keepsakes from the accumulation of things that marked the convergence of the lives of Scott and Hattie Currie McFadyen. I think we actually went in a circle, starting with her daughter (Zula Barton) and her son (my dad). Aer they chose what they wanted, then it was the turn of the two Barton grandchildren. Linda in Atlanta took the crystal via her mom's proxy. (I drank from it at Christmas this year.) Her younger brother Butch chose Mamma's diaries. ey

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