Those ‘three visits’ we all endure at some point

I’m writing from the cusp of another visit.

All four of my grandparents died while I was still in my teens. I started playing guitar after my mom’s dad “Poppy” passed. One of the first songs I ever wrote was called “Life,” even though it was about death and the three visits we all endure at some point.

My dad gave me the “three visits” idea. His mom was in the hospital. That’s what got Dad thinking about how when you’re little your grandparents are the first to pass. Then, when you’re around the same age as Dad was then, your parents depart. And finally, if you’re lucky, you’re Poppy’s age and it’s your time to go.

Heavy stuff for a 14-year-old, I know.

I still play that song sometimes. I still think about those three visits and how it doesn’t work like that for everybody. Sometimes, the order gets mixed up. Some people only get one visit — their own visit — and that’s a hard thought to reconcile, especially when you’re 7.

That’s how old my daughter is now.

A few weeks back, we were visiting my wife’s grandparents at the StoneBridge Senior Living Center. My daughter likes to hug the residents who hang out in the lobby. As a result, those residents love my daughter. After the visit, my daughter asked how people got to be that old.

I was thinking about daily exercise, avoiding carcinogens and red meat, when my daughter said, “They must just be good people.” I said, “Yeah?”

“Yeah, Dad, you’re always saying, ‘Do good things and good things happen.’ So, those people must’ve been real good to get to live that long.”

I wanted to believe her. I still do. I want to believe that there are rules to this world and that good people get a fair shake. They get their three visits in order and depart peacefully in their sleep when they’re 80-something.

But it doesn’t always work that way, does it?

Sometimes, life doesn’t make sense, and yet we try to make sense of it. We try to assign meaning to the meaningless. We create our own fan

tasies, our own myths, to help ease the pain.

The other day, after my daughter’s seventh birthday party at the aquatic center, we left her favorite towel — a blue-and-yellow octopus-shaped towel — on top of the car. We didn’t realize this until we were driving down a highly congested stretch of U.S. 64 and watched the towel go flying into a roadside ditch.

A week or so later, my mom found a blue-and-yellow octopus-shaped towel in the middle of Arkansas 333, up around Dover, over 14 miles away.

Our family is split on this discovery. Half of us think it’s not the same towel. The other half, the true believers, are convinced the towel somehow made its way back to my daughter. We’ll never know the whole story. We’ll never get to see the journey that towel made after it left us.

Life, and death, work the same way.

I wish the secret to a happy life was as simple as doing good things. I wish death stuck to the schedule and only made three preassigned visits. But I’m not 14 anymore, and my daughter’s already older than she was when she lost her favorite towel, younger than I was when I had my first visit. Eli Cranor is the nationally bestselling, Edgar-Award-winning author of “Don’t Know Tough” and “Ozark Dogs.”He can be reached using the“Contact”page at elicranor.com and found on X (formerly Twitter) @elicranor.