Goodbye to Princess Di

     Five hours behind Paris, I was in the twin bed of my uncle's funky house in Maine when word came that she had died. This was before he had moved the bed into the corner, and it was still parallel to the narrow room. With its ribbed foam mattress pad, layers of blankets and duvets innumerable as baklava, the control bulb of the electric blanket tapping against the footboard, it was a lumpy canoe of insomnia due northwest, toward Bangor.
     I had left the news bulletins, each one reluctantly graver than the last, downstairs. The reading lamp was already turned off when I heard my uncle on the chirping floorboards, coming closer through the unlighted maze of cut-up hallways and rooms. He was 64, and his steps landed always in the same spots. The old house was filled with his papers and souvenirs, sets of coronation china, postcards and photographs from former students—many of them fortyish now—and his acrylic paintings from 35 years ago. Landscapes of his beloved Maine, rocky coastlines, snow-heavy spruces, and a blood orange lake sunset with giant cattails in the foreground, they were fastidious, literal, composed but unimaginative. Yet they formed an affectionate opus, the backs of the boards amply filled in with the painter's name and location, the date, and often a handwritten paragraph of dedication. Painted for Grace L. Dodge in thanks for many kindnesses and in remembrance of many good and pleasant trips.
   
      "She's dead." My uncle spoke from out of a wedge of street light, and I could not see his face in the doorway. Water flowing downstream, the confirmation of her death came as inevitably as the end of August itself, the last night of Maine vacation. These patterns, like the worn passages of my uncle's floors, were messengers of comfort and depression both. Thus came the end of a week on Acadia, my backpack filled with Gatorade and the sandwiches of luncheon loaf and American cheese—the stigmata of the cellophane's indentation on the square slice like an envelope flap—my uncle had tucked into baggies for me that morning. Squatting on the grimy indoor-outdoor carpet of the kitchen the night before, my taped-up trail map fully unfurled, I chose from among the arteries of footpaths leading up the sides of the scoured glacial valleys one I hadn't taken before. The view out to sea, silent as an empty church except for the wind, always made me cry.
     Yet this unguessed-at ending for a princess, herself the tail end of the century's cadre of personalities, seemed against nature. There weren't cameras or writers fast enough to catch up with the shutting down of her body's systems, and the aftermath was briefly awkward.
     Ten years later, my uncle disappeared after a single weekend of chest pain. I came to the house four days afterward and found his toiletries and medications—arranged for an upcoming trip—laid out across that narrow twin bed like evidence, everything in clear plastic baggies. 
     He had been packed and ready.