our grandmother sang us to sleep with a song that nobody else in the family knew. it had four short verses and a tune that hung, at the end of each line, a fraction lower than the ear expected. it was not, she said, a song from anywhere; it was, she said, only a song.
we asked her, when we were old enough to be curious, to write it down. she said she would, and then she did not. she said she would teach it to our mother. our mother said: she has been about to teach it to me for forty years. our grandmother laughed, and held the kitchen recorder by the wrong end, and did not teach her.
when she died we had three of the verses, broken and approximate, between us. we had the tune in fragments, in different keys, depending on which of us was trying to recall it. the fourth verse was gone. we tried to sing the song at her wake and stopped at the third, looking at one another, waiting for someone to find the missing line. no one did. we let it be the end of the song.