Obituary for a Quiet Life — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER

My grandfather died this year, but you wouldn’t know it. In fact, he preferred you didn’t. Ray Harrell came up as the youngest of eight in the Cataloochee Valley in the 1930s — outrunning mountain lions and driving cattle off the mountain and crashing borrowed jeeps — and on January 20, nine decades later, he passed from this earth without a sound. That’s how he wanted it. You won’t find a headstone. Nobody gathered for a funeral. He was here, sitting on that porch he shared with his wife of nearly 70 years, and then he wasn’t. Dust to dust.

I was driving home after a day of teaching when Grandma called me. The cancer slowly draining him of life for the past year had held him in bed that morning, and it seemed he would stay there for the rest of his life.

“Would you write your papaw’s obituary?” she asked, ever practical even amid the loss of the love of her life.

There was plenty to tell. He’d stolen a school bus as a teenager and backed it over a teacher’s car. He’d been shipped to Germany with the Army in 1950, where he flew up the ranks despite accidentally firing artillery through an empty house. He’d led the union at the textile mill where he worked most of his life. But he never talked much about any of that. What he set out to do was build a small life in Fruitland, North Carolina, to raise up his daughters and do the dishes and fix the broken garage door. He set out to live quietly — and then pass away just the same.

When I sat down to write, I found myself dropping details into a template — son of, survived by. The obituary form puts a particular pressure on what matters, on what should be remembered and praised, but what does one say about a life that aimed to carry on in the background, that had no interest in a name in newsprint or an award on the mantel? Ray Harrell, son of Jim and Cora, was content to sit still and watch the breeze scatter the leaves? Ray Harrell, sergeant first class, arranged the bills in his wallet in descending order? Ray Harrell, survived by Grace, whistled the same invented tune year after year while searching for the right nail in the shed? I filled in the expected details and sent the obituary to the newspaper, but I knew it wasn’t right. It captured nothing of the life he lived. What I returned to in the days after he passed, as the ladies from church covered the table in casseroles and Grandma slept in a bed alone for the first time since she was 19, was the sheer audacity of a quiet life.