The first entry dates to 1866. There’s the day he bought his first pickup truck. Then, when Robert shot himself in the boys’ room in 1949. When the big oak in the front yard fell. When the first whippoorwill call spilled out of the woods. All these are entries on a 1947 Cardui calendar kept by D.K. Christenberry — Christenberry’s paternal grandfather.

“It’s a wonderful history,” William Christenberry told Terry Gross in 1997, noting the sensitivity bound up in the subjects spanning spring to death.

D.K. kept the calendar tacked to the wall by his bed. Toward the end of his life, when he was bedridden with asthma and a heart condition, he entered dates important to the family. In the yellowed square, hemmed in by red ink, September 5 reads: “1951 D.K. Christenberry died,” in the hand of Christenberry’s father. With it, a tradition formed.

His grandpa left it to one of his daughters, known to Bill as “Aunt Sister,” and in 1973, concerned about its longevity, Christenberry asked if he could inherit it. Aunt Sister happily agreed. Later, he’d take each month and frame it, giving it the title “Calendar Wall for D.K. Christenberry.”

In 2001, he entered his own father’s name. And as he told a crowd in D.C., “It will always be in the family.”

“We talked about that,” Andrew said, “that that would be my responsibility come time.” He, like his father, like his grandfather and great-grandfather, would take pencil to the fragile paper and inscribe the loss of his father.

After Christenberry’s death in 2016, the Mobile Museum of Art showed the calendar in their exhibition, “Christenberry: In Alabama.” So, the family went down a few days early, and there it was. “This is the moment of truth,” Andrew thought.

In the conservation department, a preparator brought down the month of November, removed the stringer, and placed the calendar on the table. Everyone cleared the room, and Andrew sat there looking over the dates.

He’d prepared beforehand, making sure to follow suit in the style of the previous entries. And staring at that medley of paper and ink and memory, Andrew put down, “2016 William Andrew Christenberry Jr. died.”

“I made it through that part pretty good. Then, of course, once I finalized it and took a breath, there it was,” he said. “There was the moment.”

“For my dad,” he explained, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was on the top tier of things that influenced him, but I know that as far as an artifact of family history, the calendar was front and center.”

“It’s in the same vein. It’s a story. You could read it like a poem.”

* * *

“When we went down for the funeral,” Andrew remembered, “I’d been thinking a lot about burial vs. cremation, because my wife, Julie, had lost her mom about two years before, and she was cremated. So, it made me think: What do I want? And where I’m headed with that is just thinking about those two options and how, for my dad, it just seemed absolutely perfect for him to be back in Alabama red earth — to be put in that ground.”

At the funeral in Tuscaloosa, Christenberry was buried next to his mother and father, and one thing stuck with Andrew: It was the red earth so ubiquitous to that part of Alabama, so dear to his father. It was all around them. Between two hummingbirds on his tombstone, the inscription reads, “Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.”

Just as they were about to lower the casket, Andrew thought of the circle his father had made in his own life — the circle Andrew was making himself. Around the grave, heaps of red earth sat piled up.

“We grabbed a couple handfuls of it and put it on the casket before we left.”

In that moment, Andrew thought, “That’s where he belongs.”