COMPLETING THE CIRCLE FOR HAZEL

Some time around her seventieth birthday, when the children were fully launched into adulthood and she was no longer caring for grandchildren, Hazel began to speak of completing the circle.  By this she meant returning to die in her place of birth.  The very idea of it baffled the family, for Hazel had never been the philosophical sort.  In fact, she was a practical woman, never had enough money to live in luxury, never seemed to pursue her personal interests, never spoke of her own passions.  She was not nostalgic, did not summon the past.  Storyteller she was not. 

 

Nobody maliciously block the path of Hazel’s happiness.  The problem with her completing the circle, as the family saw it, was that none of them lived near enough for an easy visit.  She did not drive, and there would be nobody to care for her. 

 

Nevertheless, she had all but completed the purchase of a tiny old house in a strategically located old village and was preparing to move when her plan was sidelined by the people whose help she needed.  Unable to carry it through without assistance, she grudgingly took up residence in a sparkling new seniors complex’, a short walk from the home of her eldest daughter, twenty miles away. 

 

But Hazel was not finished yet.  Next door in the seniors’ complex lived a man who could both drive a car and happily anticipate the notion of a second marriage.  One day a granddaughter, peeking in a window, noticed that Hazel was rubbing his back.  Soon enough the newlyweds announced their purchase of an old house near the place where the circle began, leaving two sparkling almost-new apartments in need of tenants.

 

There it might have ended peacefully had Hazel not been so tough, tougher than the man she married.  Both of them struggled with failing health, him with physical, her with physical and mental as well.  When he was no longer able to care for them, Hazel’s family sold the house and relocated a furious Hazel to a nursing home.  There, locked inside for her own safety, she boldly told anyone who would listen about her plan to leave and buy a house where she could complete the circle.  

 

Hazel was ninety-five years old when she died.  She outlived eight of her eleven children.  On a sunny September afternoon, with a warm breeze drying the ground for harvest, her family gathered to complete the circle.  They took her coffin to a place where most of them had never been, an historic church that stopped having Sunday services twenty-five years earlier.  Alone on the prairie landscape it stands, several miles from the old houses in the tiny village.  Next to the church is an old-fashioned church yard where Hazel’s parents, first husband and two infant daughters are buried.   It is a peaceful place, a place where history has settled among the modern farms.  Hawks perch on fence posts.  Grasshoppers dart in the ditches.  Here it is possible to forget the final years when Hazel ranted and cursed the villains she saw in those who loved her.  Here it is possible to lower her coffin and know that she is satisfied.