Dewey's Nine Lives

I signed the paperwork. I held him in my arms and against my heart. I watched his eyes close. I arranged for his cremation, numb from the shock. Then, still in a fog, I rushed home to finish packing, picked up my father at his house half a day later than planned, and drove to Omaha. I rushed to my daughter’s house, hugged my twin grandchildren, and hustled everyone to the airport. Our bottoms didn’t hit our seats, I think, until a second before the airplane took off. And then of course the twins, who were only two, needed juice and crayons and a hug until the plane leveled out and their ears stopped hurting. When I finally caught my breath somewhere in the sky over Missouri, I picked up the ratty old airline magazine. Someone had already filled in the crossword puzzle. In pen. Ugh. On the next page, though, was a picture of a cat. I started crying, and cried all the way to Sanibel Island.

There is no better place to mourn. Sanibel Island, and in particular Premier Properties of Pointe Santo, is the most relaxing spot on earth. The beach is crystal white, and there is hardly anyone on it. Well, except “no-see-ums,” evil little creatures that will bite you mercilessly if your bare flesh touches the sand. But, really, that is a small price for a paradise where you can walk (in flip-flops) along the surf, picking up coral-colored seashells, and sit on your balcony, watching mother dolphins and their babies leaping offshore. In the afternoon, I like to relax to the arguing of the mockingbirds that call back and forth to each other “Whhhaat?” (that’s the male, I’ve decided) and “Uh-uh” (that’s the sass-talking female). Even the four-foot alligator on the property is cool. You see him sometimes shuffling lazily across the lawn, completely ignoring the lounge chairs.

Then there are the sunsets. In Iowa, once in a while you get a blast of color at the end of the day, with pinks and oranges and gold. On Sanibel Island, it’s always like that, the vivid colors dominating the sky and then sinking slowly into the gorgeous blue gulf waters and bringing out the stars. You look up from the beach, or from the wine you’re sipping on your balcony, and feel happy and free, awed by the natural beauty and ready to toast a perfect end to another glorious day.

Or that’s usually how it is. With a wedding to attend and long-absent relatives to soothe (and sometimes pretend to ignore), the week after Dewey’s death was going to be crazy, even before the emotional bombshell of his passing. Fortunately, my granddaughter Hannah, the flower girl, distracted me in the unique manner of children: She gave me the flu. Along with twenty-seven other people at the rehearsal dinner. I spent most of the week watching cartoons with Hannah on the sofa, and I spent more time on my knees staring into the toilet bowl than I did watching dolphins frolic in the surf. I was too weak for the telephone, television, or e-mail (I was barely strong enough to follow Dora the Explorer’s mind-numbing adventures, in fact), so I had no idea that back home, Dewey’s popularity was exploding and the library phones were ringing off the hook. I could only look out the window at the ocean and think what a small piece of the world we all were, and how nice it was that the bathroom was only ten feet from the television. Even when you’re vomiting five times a day, there is nothing quite like the peace of Sanibel Island.

So I know what Mary Nan Evans meant when she told me that her thought, on seeing Sanibel Island for the first time, was: “There is no way I could ever afford to live here.” Paradise, after all, had been reserved long ago for the rich and powerful, and like me, Mary Nan was a small-town girl from the Midwest. Her husband, Larry, a maintenance man at a hospital in Waverly, Missouri, had won employee of the year for the state’s western district, and the prize was four days on this small island off the southwest coast of Florida. Mary Nan had been to Florida many times before—she had an aunt who lived in Fort Myers, just up the coast—but the merging of the brilliant blue sky and the brilliant blue water around the tight green strip of Sanibel Island was like nothing she had ever seen. Even the white buildings visible on the horizon looked like the sharpened edges of clouds. As she crossed the long causeway linking the island to the mainland, she thought to herself, Remember this, Mary Nan, because you’ll never be back.