A Light Has Gone Out

This morning, Boy decided he wanted to play at 3am. I came in, quieted him, turned him on his side, and we both went back to bed.

He decided that no, he really did want to play, so I let him… but I stayed in bed and kept my eyes closed, dozing intermittently, listening for the distinct sound of oh no nobody’s coming to play so I must wake everyone up. He didn’t do that until 4:30, when I came in again, changed him, turned him on his side, and went back to bed. Again.

I tried, oh how I tried to doze back off. I only went to bed at 12:30am (because my brain was full of what’s below), so I knew I was toast if I didn’t sleep. At 5, I gave up, and cruised the internet and started this post.

He woke up again at 5:30.

Shit. Going to be a long day.

~~

What I was expecting yesterday was a call from my dad saying that my niece made a safe entry into the world, as last I’d heard, Brother #4’s wife was scheduled for a c-section. Instead, the call started with a statement that his niece, my cousin A, had called. Aunt E died yesterday morning.

On her 99^th birthday.

A few days after my previous post, Cousin A had called Dad to say that Aunt E had been in the hospital and was going to hospice. Two days later she was home. She did it again! She’d been sent to hospice a few years ago and bounced back. As another cousin said, the next thing we know we’ll get the news she’s walking on water. She’s always bounced back.

Dad has been itchy since then about going to the shithole on the state line to see his sister, but something has always come up. Boy’s therapies or clinic visits. I’m sick. DH is sick. Dad got a nasty cold. Boy has the sniffles. Yeah… you can’t go and visit someone who is extremely elderly who just got out of the hospital for a respiratory infection and pneumonia if you’re sick yourself.

I was literally on the verge of calling Aunt E’s house to a) wish her happy birthday and b) to ask if we could set up a visit, when Dad’s call came through.

Naturally, I’m sad and heartbroken. Aunt E has been part of the fabric of all my life, something many of my paternal cousins can say; she was the thread that bound that side of the family together. And in the last two years I had wanted to get to the inconvenient city she lives in (just outside of three hours away), not only for the pleasure of seeing her but to have the pleasure of her seeing my boy, and getting a picture of it.

Dad, understandably, is devastated; he is now the last of what had been a large family. He had promised his sister he’d visit, but wanted me to take him as she was always reticent with any of the boys around for some reason, but sang like a bird with me around. While I think he initially blamed me for failing to take him and therefore breaking his promise, I did point out that in the past three weeks there had not been opportunity or a gap when any of us were not sick. And there’s no way that we could have been around her with even a garden-variety cold. He knows this in his heart, but his mind I think is not accepting. There’s nothing I can do about it now. I’ll be sorry if he wants me to be sorry, but I’m not. That’s just life.

~~

My cousin M, the daughter of another paternal aunt (Aunt M), had been very close to Aunt E. M had lived with Auntie for several periods while growing up because of her mother’s difficulties. She just adored Auntie, who was really to her a second mother, a true mother. Oh, and never mind that M’s birthday is the day after Aunt E’s. So close, they talked all the time; they even shared this morbid fascination as to who would die first, E or M, as M has had several health problems for years… instead of being weird, it became a rather funny running joke.

So, when M’s husband asked M what she wanted for her birthday, she said she wanted to drive out to see Aunt E, an even longer drive than what I have. Yesterday, she called to not only wish Auntie a happy birthday, but also to check and see if Auntie could handle a visit. The granddaughter who had been living with Auntie (and was her caretaker) answered, and said sadly, “I’m sorry to have to say this, but she just passed away.”

“No, no, no…”

The first person I called after Dad called me yesterday was not any of my siblings, but Cousin M, knowing that she would be completely shattered by the news. She told me that Auntie had been sharp as a tack to the very end; on the last day of her life, she was just very tired, still not feeling well from the cold that had nearly killed her, and went to bed early. Around 7:30 yesterday morning, the granddaughter came in to check on her as she always did, and found that Auntie was gone – must have just died, in fact, because her hands were still warm.

So that is a blessing – Auntie died in her own bed, without pain, in her sleep, something everyone wants but not what everyone gets. She never got over losing her husband nigh on thirty years ago, and so now she’s reunited with him. God rest her soul.

~~

She lived exactly 99 years, January 26 to January 26. What a life! Born in 1913, one of five children, her early childhood was during the privations and stresses of World War I. She was about seven when her mother, my grandfather’s first wife, died of tuberculosis. Unlike her eldest sister Aunt P, who resented her stepmother/my grandmother from the day she married my grandfather, Aunt E embraced and adored her stepmother, eventually naming her second daughter after her; later, her eldest daughter would also name a daughter after her step-grandmother. All her life, Auntie kissed the ground her two baby brothers, the two children my grandparents had together – of whom my dad was one – walked on, despite the age difference.

Auntie’s late husband, who she married when she was seventeen, had been a dentist, so they were comfortable. That wasn’t satisfying to her; in a day and age where a woman was expected to stay home, she had her own paint store in Tucson instead, very much a trailblazer thirty-plus years before Women’s Lib was big.

She had a heart the size of Texas, too: at various points, she took in this niece or that nephew or this or that grandchild for extended periods of time. This too had its heartache: when Cousin M’s eldest brother “Buddy” was having severe behavioral problems, Aunt E took him in, loved him, and got him turned around – unfortunately, when his mother, Aunt M, decided to ‘play mother’ again, it wrought havoc in his life; it would be one of Aunt E’s great sorrows when Buddy, who was still living with Auntie at that point, went back to her house after a fight with his mother one day, went into his room, and put a gun in his mouth. It is a mark of strength that it didn’t break her. I don’t think I could have handled that.

It had to have been hard to watch those she loved go before her. While her three children are still alive – the eldest is 80! – she’s witnessed the loss of all of her siblings save one, her “baby” brother (she called Dad that in every single birthday card), all of her siblings-in-law save one (Uncle J’s wife, who is 88 and failing), and so many others beloved to her. It’s the curse of being elderly, something Dad is experiencing, too. Yet while she mourned, sometimes bitterly, her spirit was unbroken.

~~

The last ten years have been hard on her, with the loss of independence – first it was the encroaching deafness, then the macular degeneration that slowly took her sight, and then in recent years her physical endurance failed, forcing her homebound. Her courage, however, never failed, no matter how hard the loss of her sacred independence was on her.

But I suspect something broke in her with this latest issue. Remember, she was signed over to hospice – and she had been at least twice in the last five years and came through to live a few more years – and she was well enough that when she insisted on going home, they released her. Yet I think this last time took some vital essence out of her, weakened her, and depleted her will to live.

Cousin M said that Auntie had said in the last six months, in her indirect way, that she was ready to go. Therefore, really, there’s no reason to cry – she was ready, and it was her time.

If they did an autopsy (which they won’t, but just saying), they’d probably find she’d just died of old age.

~~

She was a sister and a dear friend to my mother for the almost fifty years of my parents’ marriage; Mom’s death broke her heart, and she couldn’t speak of Mom without choking up for the longest time.

She had a horror of the though of outliving her baby brother, my dad. At least she doesn’t have to live through that.

~~

In many ways, to me she was the grandparent I never had (all of them died before I was born, the curse of being a late child of a late child), and a link to them outside of Dad. Cards for birthdays, checks sent for major life events despite a severely restricted income (somehow Uncle B didn’t leave Auntie with much in her old age), always an open phone line and a great correspondent. I think if her eyesight hadn’t failed her so badly in the last fifteen years, she might have enjoyed email as a fast way of communication.

While I am sad, it’s really no surprise. I shed tears, of course, but there’s no need to wail: she was 99, after all, and her death, while mourned, is hardly tragic. She had a full life, with all its highs and lows. And I don’t think she ever spoke ill of anyone in her life – oh, she had people she definitely liked and disliked, but she usually just smiled and moved on with the latter; I know that’s something I never mastered. She was a rare human being, and her like will never be seen again.

The next to last chapter of the seven siblings is done. It remains to be seen how the the last chapter, and the story, will end.

~~

As I alluded to in my previous post, now I have to watch my dad’s mental state. I spent most of the day with him yesterday, both to talk his grief out and to keep an eye on him. He’s stoic – you won’t see him weeping and wailing, a failing I have as well. However, I had a hard time keeping a lid on my sorrow so I didn’t upset him more than he already was.

Since it’s my understanding that Auntie wanted no funeral and no memorial, but just going to be cremated and interred in Tucson with Uncle B, it’s going to be hard to have closure in some ways. I think I might just hit up Cousin M, get together, and remember and toast an amazing woman and amazing life.