My Last Name

by Eric M. Schumacher

I remember now. This is my apartment. “Assisted living,” they called it, though I seem to receive more assistance and do less living these days.

My mother often said that all a man has in this world—the only thing he’s born with, and the only thing he can take to the grave—is the dignity of being a human being. That is how she treated our father—with the dignity of being human.

There is an oldness—and not a good oldness—that settles on a person, even a young person, when they have walked through seasons of grief and disappointment. There is a seriousness that settles on a person when they have felt the weight of loss and responsibility and worry.

“Don’t know where I’d be now,” he said at Dad Carlson’s funeral, “if it hadn’t been for a gracious old man who taught me how to work and how to live.”