stupid things, things I had no intention of doing. So I was very disturbed to discover that death could find me, too. According to my source, if I was "lucky," my death would happen the same way my grandfather did. Old. Smelling of pipe smoke and farts, with wads of tissue stuck to the stubble above his upper lip from blowing his nose. Black lines of dirt under his fingernails from gardening; eyes turning yellow at the corners, reminding me of the marble from my uncle's collection that my sister had a habit of sucking and swallowing, causing my father to come running over to throw his arms around her belly and squeeze her until she spat the marble back out. Old. Brown pants pulled up high on his waist, stopping just above his flabby, woman-like chest, revealing a soft paunch and testicles squeezed tight to one side of the crotch of his pants. Old. No, I didn't want to die like my grandfather had, but dying old, my source revealed, was the best alternative. I learned of my impending death from Kevin, my older cousin, on the day of Grandpa's funeral, as we sat on the grass at the bottom of his long yard with plastic cups of red lemonade in our hands and as far away as possible from our grieving parents, who looked more like dung beetles on what was the hottest day of the year. The grass was covered with dandelions and daisies and much longer than usual, since Grandpa's illness had prevented him from tending his garden in the last weeks of his life. I remember feeling sad for him, and wanting to defend him too, since, of all the days to show off his beautiful garden to his neighbors and friends, on this day the plants were not as perfect as he had always aspired. He wouldn't have minded not being there-he wasn't much of a talker-but he would have at least cared about the yard's appearance, and then disappeared to hear the praise from afar, away from everyone, perhaps upstairs through an open window. He would have pretended not to care, but he did care, a satisfied smile on his face to match his grass-stained knees and blackened fingernails. Someone, an old lady with a rosary of beads wound tightly around her knuckles, said she felt him in the garden, but I didn't. I was sure he wasn't there. He would have been so irritated by the way the garden looked that he couldn't have stood there. My grandmother would punctuate the silence with phrases like, "His sunflowers are in bloom, bless his soul," and "He couldn't even see the petunias bloom." To which my smart-ass cousin Kevin said, "Yeah, his body's turned into compost now." Everyone snickered; Everyone always laughed at the things Kevin said because Kevin was cool, because Kevin was the oldest, five years older than me, and at the ripe old age of ten, he would say cruel and mean things that no one else would dare say. Even if we didn't find it funny, we still had to laugh because if we didn't, he would quickly turn us into the object of his cruelty, and that's what he did to me that day. On that rare occasion, I didn't find it funny that Grandpa's dead body was underground and helping the petunias grow, nor did I find it cruel. I saw a certain beauty in it. And a lovely fullness and justice, too. It was exactly what my grandfather would have loved, now that his thick sausage-like fingers could no longer contribute to the blooming of his long, beautiful garden that was the center of his universe. It was my grandfather's love of gardening that inspired the choice of my name: Jasmine. This was what he brought to my mother in the hospital when I was born: a bouquet of flowers he had plucked from the wooden frame he had built himself and painted red that adorned the shadowy back wall, wrapped in newspaper and tied with brown string, the ink from the Irish Times crossword puzzle dripping with rainwater that had gotten on the stems. It wasn't the summer jasmine we all know from expensive scented candles and fancy room vaporizers; I had been born in winter, and so the little jasmine, with its small, yellow flowers like stars, was in abundance in his garden to help brighten the dull winter. I don't think my grandfather ever thought about the meaning of the flower, or whether he felt particularly honored by my mother's honor in naming me after the flower he had brought. I think it was a strange name for a child to give him, a name he had only ever invented for natural things in the garden, never for a person. With a name like Adalbert, after a saint who had been a missionary