Nuts.
I’ve learned that my mother’s sister passed away on New Year’s Eve. We’re gathering soon to remember her and say our farewells.
I remember Aunt Joyce in the kitchen mostly, or sitting around the table with some coffee. And then a little more coffee, and something to go with it. And then another bite, maybe with some jam or apple butter. You know, there might be another slice of pie in the fridge….
I remember the noisy chaos of epic Thanksgiving dinners with tables full of friends and family, Christmases with my cousins, and the long car ride to get there. Joyce had a gift of being able to rescue casseroles that were missing ingredients, or improvising a cake. Or a pie, or cookies, or a care package to hungry college students. Then, when dinner was ready, a quick dash to get out of her worn house dress and slippers (or was she barefoot?) and into something more fancy. Since I saw her most often around the holidays, or so it seems now, I remember her with snow on the ground outside.
She played piano or organ for all kinds of services. I remember a duet once at some kind of a rehearsal (don’t ask me when or where, please). My mother decided to kick the hymn up the scale to a new key and Joyce followed. (And please don’t ask me which hymn it was either!) After the chorus came around again, we were treated to some jazzy boogie-woogie and a sheepish grin from my mother and a delighted giggle from Joyce.
I thought it was just musical magic.
I stayed at her house for a summer, tearing down an old abandoned house that mournfully occupied a weed-strewn lot. They told me this is where they would build their new house. I think it was the summer of… definitely 1970 something, but closer to 1980. I say I stayed at HER house for a reason. I think my Uncle Lowell stayed within the last six inches of the end of his nerves some how, for all of those many years. I don’t know how it worked, and perhaps it didn’t really work – but well, there you go. The glimpses of Joyce at her best made me wonder what the family matriarch Molly O’Reilly might have really been like, but I’m not sure I would have been courageous enough to find out.
The last time I saw her was a few years ago at my nephew’s wedding. She was in a wheelchair, as was my mother. The two of them chatted in quieter voices that day, in fits and spurts between naps and watching the kid’s games from under a large tent in the sun. They reminisced together about old friends (most of whom were ‘gone’). They tried to remember details, tried to put names to faces in boxes full of pictures – with some great successes – but failing memories…..
They were miles from their childhood in so many ways, but really just down the road a short drive. The Muskegon they had loved as children had long since changed.
More recently though, even those memories were gone and she was lost in her own fog of Alzheimer’s. My mother grieved a little bit every time she called her sister to have a little conversation, some connection. Finally the point came where she saw the futility of it and stopped trying to call. It was just too much to have a sister and to not have that sister – all at the same time. Heartbreaks need to heal, and you can’t do that with the wound so open.
With any family death, the waves and wrinkles of the event mark the time in unexpected ways. It seems to me that the surprises are always in the after effects, the echoes of that life, and in the finality of the final rites. It’s when life and death are at their rawest moments of conflict, that the best and worst of people surface, perhaps both within the span of just a moment or two. But because it is family, it gets assimilated as one of the unwritten jokes that line the holiday chatter. Or, it gets forgiven and forgotten.
All of the whirling breezes of each person’s future possibilities are captured and reflected as if by multiple sets of pinwheels within pinwheels bravely standing on a framework in a fickle wind. The urges of climbing mountains diminish to a whisper; The chance to travel abroad goes ignored; Learning another language gets scoffed at; and every other possibility grinds to an awkward halt for each of us, when the breeze simply cannot blow or the pinwheel cannot react to its simple presence.
This is when the rest of us take our favored pinwheels from the stilled sculpture of what has been (or what probably was), and remember the breeze that blew through that life, and hold it as dearly as the “might have been”s, the “could have been”s, and the needless “if only”s. Some become bronzed and eventually dusty. Others put into boxes for special occasions. But the breeze has moved on. Or, perhaps we could catch some for ourselves?
So a goodbye for Aunt Joyce. So long, and thanks for all the cookies. Tell Goober we all said, ‘Hey’.
