This story nearly comes full circle while also leaving so many questions left to be answered. It begins with the narrator and her husband Franklin planning their death, deliberating whether to leave a note or not. It ends with the narrator professing that should she die, she’d want for Franklin to read the note that she left behind. From this we can tell that even though years have passed from the flashback that the narrator presents us with, her mind is still unchanged about leaving a note behind for others to read just as Franklin’s mind is unchanged about leaving the note alone, unwilling to write one, fine without reading one from his late wife. Without saying exactly what “it” is that is characteristic of their relationship, the narrator says that, “It went back through [their] whole life together”, “it” potentially meaning their differences in their attitude towards life.
Franklin comes off as more of the calm, cool, and collected kind of guy while the narrator seems to be taken off into the air with her thoughts, allowing them to consume her and influence her decisions, even going so far as to leave town on suspicions that Franklin is cheating with Dolly, his blast from the past.
After all this time that they’ve been together the narrator seems to hold some distrust towards Franklin. She knows his likes and dislikes, his patterns and behaviors. She knows intricate details about him and yet there is much that she doesn’t know about him: his past. The narrator was likely a young teen when Franklin was at war, engaging in moments of fleeting desire and passion that eventually gave rise to the poem that he is most known for. The narrator even makes it a point to say that she only felt younger than Franklin when he spoke of the war. There is this immense curiosity that the narrator holds in association to Franklin that she doesn’t truly recognize until Dolly comes in (as a stranger to her) in an unexpected visit to sell her makeup. This curiosity turns to jealousy when she finds that Dolly was Franklin’s former lover.
The final lines of this story go to affirm that the narrator would go against Franklin’s wishes to satisfy her own curiosities and that she knows deeply, that Franklin would respect any boundaries she set, even if it was a final farewell. Franklin’s rejection of the narrrator’s idea to leave a suicide note behind also affirms this notion that he has of I am mature enough to die and in my eyes, you are not. Even in their old age together, just twelve years apart in age, this rift in age is as much a problem for the narrator as it is for Franklin. It keeps them from seeing eye to eye. They lived through very different times, and as the narrator writes, their difference in outlook on life “went back through their whole life together”, and impacted their relationship as a result.
Coming to Age 