I’m sitting at my desk, up to my bleary eyeballs in 1099s, when my cell phone rings. The screen tells me my son is on the other end. Question 1: Are you at work? Answer, yes. Question 2: Are you busy? It is January 29th and I have two days to get a gazillion 1099s for eleven different corporations printed and entrusted to the personnel of the United States Postal Service. No. Of course I’m not busy. I’m just hangin’ out at the home, playing Text Twist and Sudoku on the computer, waitin’ for 5:00 to roll around. He needs to come by (it is his day off) to take care of some business and wonders if his children—my grandchildren—can hang out in bookkeeping for a while. That’s just about the only interruption he can propose to which I will acquiesce on January 29th.

Of course, food is in order since they’ve just left their respective schools. Wilson requests a rice cake covered in peanut butter (yes, I have both at work) and Anderson attaches himself to a package of peanut butter and honey crackers (are you seeing a recurring peanut butter theme here? It’s genetic, encoded into the Shackelford DNA). Anderson settles in at the desk occupied by my cousin when she’s working in Savannah (I’m sorry, Claire. I tried to get the grease off of everything—but you may want to check your chair for crumbs) and begins the task of cracker consumption when he looks to the left and sees a cartoon she has taped to the printer. The wording is irrelevant (and probably not something I really need to repeat here) but next to the words is a rather ugly picture of the Grim Reaper. Anderson, to say the least, is intrigued.

“Mona,” he asks, “who is that?” to which I reply, rather matter-of-factly, “That’s Death.” Picking up another cracker, Anderson studies the picture for a moment then looks at me and asks, “Is he mean?”

Hmmmmm. Is he mean? I suppose it would depend upon who you asked. If you are the mother of the child who simply did not wake up one morning, Death is a thief who has stolen from you that which you cherish more than life itself. If you are the young husband with two small children whose wife has just died from some terrible, incurable disease, Death is a monster—a cold-hearted, unfeeling monster that cares nothing for the misery it inflicts. If you ask the parent whose child did not come home tonight because the car in which they were riding was involved in a horrible accident, Death is an evil that sucks the very soul from your body, leaving you empty and helpless in its aftermath. In those instances, “mean” might be the nicest description you could apply.

But suppose you are the child who has watched their aging parent decline year after year, succumbing to the ravages of dementia until they are no longer able to recognize even those to whom they were closest? Or what about the wife who has watched her husband of sixty plus years endure unbearable, unrelenting, incapacitating pain with no hope of recovery? To those people who love so dearly . . . so deeply . . . so unselfishly that they plead for an end to the suffering of those for whom they care, Death is a blessing.
Charles Caleb Colton said “Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.” To use a literary analogy, Death is the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of the netherworld—benevolent on the one hand and the devil incarnate on the other. So when a four year old asks you if Death is mean, what do you say? Sometimes . . . but not always.

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