The graveside service, in a grim prairie churchyard or some cinematic cemetery with old trees and broad green lawns, provides dramatic ballast for hundreds of motion pictures. Filmmakers like to shoot the scene from a bird’s-eye camera, or zoom in from a great distance on the griefhushed gathering until we can hear the clergyman’s traditional words of cold comfort. It’s a foolproof setup, almost a cliche, that often forces our tears with a small child who stands palefaced at military attention like John-John Kennedy at Arlington–or more realistically fidgets and pulls at his mother’s coat or runs off among the trees. It’s understood, and part of the pathos, that the rituals of death as yet mean nothing to this child. But just as often there’s an adolescent–a boy in a blue blazer and a borrowed striped tie, a girl in a long cloth coat with a bow in her hair-who’s just old enough to comprehend that death is final and serious, and that a familiar emotional landscape has been forever altered.

That was my role, as I recall it, at the first funeral I ever attended. I was thirteen; my greatgrandmother, Mary Ann Naylor Crowther, was dead at ninety-four. She was born in Southowram, Yorkshire, near Halifax, during the American Civil War, and emigrated to the United States when she was a girl. She lived in this country for three-quarters of a century and never lost or noticeably altered her mid-Victorian North Country accent. “‘Aaarold,” she called me, and hated my nickname: “The boy’s name is ‘Aaarold–‘Al’s a fool’s name.” “Name” was pronounced more like “nem,” I remember, and she rolled her “L’s” exotically.

I loved my great-grandmother. I was the only great-grandchild old enough to attempt a more or less adult conversation, and old enough to be unintimidated by her strange accent and her great age. She was tall, thin, and ramrod-straight, very severe-looking when I knew her, but of course she was in her eighties when we met. She was the oldest person I knew. I used to sit up in her room after she broke her hip and could no longer negotiate the stairs. She reminisced about horse-and-buggy England and about Queen Victoria; she claimed to remember the death of Abraham Lincoln, though she was only three when he was killed. We drank tea with milk, a habit I’ve retained. She indulged me with hard candy, butterscotch and peppermint, from a tin in the top drawer of her dresser. Above the dresser was a Constable-inspired oil painting of an idealized English landscape, a herd of brindle cows in a water-meadow at dusk. No doubt my great-grandmother was one of the reasons I gravitated, during my academic period, toward the poetry and fiction of Thomas Hardy.

It was probably the first fully civilized relationship I ever experienced. At her funeral, one of the first questions that came to me was “Who will speak for her now?” She was a domestic spirit from another century who never imposed herself much on the world at large. Though her husband, whom she’d outlived by thirty-three years, had been an ambitious, periodically flamboyant man of business, I’ve had no luck imagining her as a businessman’s wife in the age of George Babbitt. There was much I could never know about her; in her last years no one except me, a child, had been listening to her carefully. And now she was dead.