The Clock That Stops the Night Before Someone in Our Family Dies

We have a clock. It is a mantel clock, mahogany, with a moon-faced dial and a slow deep tick you can hear in the next room. It has been in the family since the 1890s and it keeps perfect time, which is the whole problem.

Because four times in my life, that clock has stopped. Not run slow. Not needed winding. Stopped, dead, mid-tick, at a random hour, and each of those four times, someone in our family died within the day.

The first time I was seven. The clock stopped at 3:10 in the afternoon and my mother went white and made a phone call, and that night my great-aunt died two states away, and no one had known she was even sick. The second time I was nineteen. Third, twenty-eight. The fourth was three years ago. Every time: the clock stops, and inside of twenty-four hours the phone rings.

Now, I am a reasonable person. I know how this sounds. And for most of my life I had a reasonable answer ready, which is that a hundred-year-old clock stops sometimes, that people die every day, and that a family this size loses someone often enough that you can always find a stopped clock near a death if you go looking. My grandfather, who owned the clock before me, believed every word of that. He called the family curse nonsense. He wound the clock every Sunday and rolled his eyes at his own sisters, who would not stay in the same house as it.

When my grandfather died -- and yes, the clock stopped, at 6:45 in the morning, and he was gone by nightfall -- I inherited it. And when I finally worked up the nerve to have it cleaned, the old repairman took the back off and found, folded behind the movement where it had sat for over a century, a slip of paper in a spidery hand.

It was, as best we can tell, a note from the clockmaker himself. It was dated 1893. And it did not say what I wanted it to say. I wanted it to say something rational, a warranty, a repair note. Instead it said, in translation, that the clock had been made for my family from the wood of a particular tree, a tree that had stood over the graves of the family in the old country, and that the maker had been asked to build a clock that would keep the family, his words, in one another's company across the distance, so that no one would pass alone or unremarked.

So that no one would pass alone.

Read one way, that is beautiful. Read another way, it is the coldest thing I have ever held in my hands. My family, back in the 1890s, scattering across an ocean, terrified of dying among strangers with no one back home ever knowing -- they commissioned a clock to be an alarm bell for their own deaths. A device whose entire purpose was to announce, we have lost one, wherever you are, stop and take notice.

And it works. That is the part I cannot get past. Whatever the mechanism -- and I have theories, none of them satisfying, all of them involving the words coincidence or subconscious or humidity -- the fact remains that four times I have watched that clock die and four times the phone has rung.

My daughter is grown now and she wants nothing to do with it. She says it is morbid, that she will not have a death-clock on her mantel, that when I am gone she is selling it or burying it or burning it. And I understand her. I do.

But I keep thinking about that line. So that no one would pass alone or unremarked. My family were poor people who crossed an ocean and knew they would likely never see their parents or their homeland again, and they were so afraid of vanishing without a witness that they built a witness out of graveyard wood and wound it every Sunday for a hundred and thirty years.

I wind it every Sunday too. I tell myself it is habit. But the truth is I cannot stand the thought of one of my own dying somewhere far away and me not knowing, not feeling it, not stopping whatever I am doing to mark it. The clock terrifies me. And I will keep it until I die, because the alternative -- a family that lets its people pass alone and unremarked -- terrifies me more.

The clock is ticking right now, as I write this. Perfect time. I checked it twice.