In the summer of 1998, shortly after my girlfriend Valerie moved out of our Brooklyn apartment, using the excuse that I was too depressing to live with, Mom called me from her Harlem brownstone, sniffling into the phone.

“He’s gone, David,” she said, her voice cracking. “I knew as soon as they started cutting off limbs, he wouldn’t be around long.”

Although Mom hadn’t said a name, I knew she was talking about her father, my grandfather, James Ellison. Living in the small town of Peterson, W.Va., since the days when FDR was in the White House, Granddaddy was a diabetic who, a few months before, had his right foot amputated. At the time of his death, the doctors were considering taking the whole leg. A tall, quiet man with skin the color of copper, he was soft-spoken and stern as a preacher and handsome as a movie star.

Years before, the small town of Peterson, populated by a quaint assemblage of families whose small world revolved around church and community, had been as dull and charming as a Norman Rockwell painting. I first visited when I was 7. For a city boy born and raised in New York, going south in the summertime was a welcome reprieve from the hustle of Harlem. In Peterson, friendly neighbors greeted one another with toothy smiles, and the music of crickets replaced the wail of police sirens, while lightning bugs fluttered around the front yard flickering near the immaculate rose bushes. Back then, it was a thrill to meet so many relations who lived down the road, across the street or next door to one another.

Aunt Eva, who I thought was one of the sweetest women on the planet, was Granddaddy’s second wife. Closing my eyes, I imagined her standing over Granddaddy’s hospital bed as his small and shriveled body lay lifeless in the bed. Seeing her face, he tried to talk, but forming anything other than moans would’ve been impossible. “He couldn’t even work in his garden anymore,” Mom continued, laughing through her tears. “God knows he needed those roses more than those flowers needed him.”

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