It’s not surprising that Thanksgiving would be somewhat death-haunted. After all, I was driving Judy’s car to see Judy’s sister and her family.

Once I arrived, I found myself staring at sister Becky because she reminds me so much of Judy. It’s as if they share/d identical metabolisms. Both move/d slowly, deliberately; their eyes blink/ed slowly.[1] Anyway, I warned Becky that if I seemed to be staring at her a lot, sisterly likeness was the reason. She smiled a slow sweet that’s-okay smile.

We enjoyed a beautiful five days weatherwise, the setting Reynolds Preserve, a residential golf resort with autumnal foliage ablaze. Companionshipwise, a beautiful five days as well, son Ned was there and brother-in-law Big Dave and my nephew Scott and his wife Jessie and their daughters, the grandnieces, Emily and Annie, six and four, lovely and smart and honest. I overheard Emily say, “[. . .] Aunt Judy, who’s already dead.”

Here’s a mandala Emily drew celebrating the gathering.

Saturday, on the way back, I stopped in Aiken for an hour and had dinner with my Aunt Maria and cousins Pamela and Scarlet and their brood: spouses, in-laws, children, and children’s children. It seems I only see these kin when someone is dying or dead — Uncle David, Daddy, Mama, Judy — so I wanted to make a point of talking with Aunt Maria, a spry, car-driving eighty-three, while she was upright and smiling. A war bride, she has been living in Aiken County going on 70 years. I especially enjoy hearing what’s left of her now Southern-smothered German accent. Her elongated vowels have unclipped the Teutonic cadences. Yet German lies underneath, like a sonic archeological lower layer.

I could only stay an hour because I wanted to pick up Ms L. Muldoon from the Charleston airport. She had seen the night before a production of James Joyce’s “The Dead” at the New York Irish Historical Society. She texted about the “heaviness” at the end “with the snow and all.”

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. [Gabriel] watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

So when I left Pamela’s, headed back to Charleston, I listened to Donal Donnelly’s reading Episode 6 of Ulysses, the Hades episode, when Bloom rides in a carriage to Dignam’s funeral and burial. I was on back roads, taking Highway 4 through Springfield and Neeses, (dare I say) dying Orangeburg County towns, and it seemed like every four miles I passed a cemetery in some podunk country churchyard with a chain-linked fence surrounding the graves.

Meanwhile, in his carriage Bloom reads from the obituary page of the morning paper the names of the deceased, “[i]nked characters fast fading on the frayed breaking paper.”

Through the carriage window:

White horses with white frontlet plumes came round the Rotunda corner, galloping. A tiny coffin flashed by. In a hurry to bury. A mourning coach. Unmarried. Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors. Dun for a nun.

— Sad, Martin Cunningham said. A child.

Highway 4 is a lovely road that rises and falls through horse country before flattening out near Orangeburg. I usually listen to AM gospel radio stations when passing through Orangeburg County – I dig the vocal groups, the church announcements, and especially, the high-octane iambic admonitions of preacher men– but Joyce and his medium Donnelly had me hypnotized.

Mr Bloom came last, folding his paper again into his pocket. He gazed gravely at the ground till the coffincart wheeled off to the left. The metal wheels ground the gravel with a sharp grating cry and the pack of blunt boots followed the barrow along a lane of sepulchres.

Bloom, who has lost a father to suicide and his young son Rudy to disease, sees death for what it is, inevitable and commonplace:

A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else.

I was already in the town of Orangeburg by the time Dingam’s

gravediggers put on their caps and carried their earthy spades towards the barrow. Then knocked the blades lightly on the turf: clean. One bent to pluck from the haft a long tuft of grass. One, leaving his mates, walked slowly on with shouldered weapon, its blade blueglancing.

Dingam was six-feet under, and Episode 6 had run its course, so I reached over for some early Stones.

“Come On” came blasting from the speakers. I had turned the Joyce, as Lucinda Williams would say, “way up high.”

But I didn’t turn it down. I was on the Interstate doing 75 airport bound.

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[1] Becky was a 10/10 match for the marrow transplant never to be.