Painless Endings Guest Entry

Death and Taxes: A Child's Perspective

Lynn, Massachusetts.

My father had a younger brother named David, who drowned when he was four years old. I remember the first time I saw his gravestone; I was about five or six years old.

We were at the cemetery on Memorial day; my father was putting flowers on the graves of some of his relatives. He pointed to David's grave and told me that it was his brother, and explained the circumstances of his death.

I looked at it and just froze in shock and sadness: the shock may have been that it was the first time that I realized that children die, or that I was supposed to have an uncle that I didn't know; I'm not quite sure. But the sadness was because it was the most heartbreaking gravestone I have ever seen, then or since. It was white and very small, and only about one foot high. The only writing on it was this:

OUR DAVID

No last name, no dates of birth or death. I cried at the cemetery then, not for this little boy David himself, but for the anguish of the people whose David he was. And tears are trickling out again now as I picture those words.

Usually, the name on a gravestone identifies and isolates an individual person. Sometimes the words "loving husband of --" or "beloved mother of --" remind you that they left families behind, but nothing has ever made a family's grief so plain to me as that word "OUR."

[image] Papoose Pond, Maine.

I was at a campground in Maine when I was five years old, when I first heard of sales taxes, and when I discovered the amazing concept that you can add nothing to nothing and come up with something.

The campground had a little snack bar, and I went there with my older sister. We were each going to buy a candy bar. The sales-tax rate in Maine and the price of candy bars at the time were such that if you bought a single candy bar, the tax was less than one cent, so no tax was charged. But if you bought two, it added up to a bit more than one cent, so you had to pay the extra penny. So our plan was to pay for them separately. (A penny was a big deal in those days. Well, not BIG, but not insignificant. You could actually buy a piece of penny candy with one.)

When we reached the snack bar, it was mobbed. (A campground activity had just ended -- fireworks or a sing-along or something, I forget just what -- so every child in the camp was descending on the snack bar at the same time.) We got in line, except it wasn't a line at all; it was a horde. We got separated, and my sister ended up way behind me. I remember being squished in a pack of strangers, and hearing her yell to me that I should buy two candy bars, rather than have us both fight our way to the front of the line. This is the image that I have clearly in my mind: seeing her arm rising above the sea of heads, holding a dime and that extra tax-penny, and then seeing the coins get passed thrugh the crowd from one kid to another, until they reached me.

It didn't strike me as unusual that this money passed through the hands of several strangers (strangers who craved candy, no less) and still arrived safely. I was only five years old; I expected that. It was the concept of having to pay the extra cent, solely because I was buying two candy bars together instead of separately, that mystified me.

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