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’.

Omazeprole, Omazeprole!
You rescue me from gurping
I sleep all night without a fight
Cuz acid is not slurping
Omazeprole, Omazeprole!
How well you kill the acid!

Omazeprole, Omazeprole!
Delightful holiday reliever!
We stuff our face
complete disgrace,
Still more room for pie!
Omazeprole, Omazeprole!
How well you kill the acid!

Walking down a foggy morn,
hushed in the heaviness
near the river, where the land is torn.

Maple ladies in states of orange undress
ply their yearly trade above the rainslick’d ways.

Seductive. What lies beyond the fog? Is it
cold and wet and thoughtless? Will I remember it, or will
the half-remembered embarrass me?

Branches slowly beckon in the breeze. “Come, play among us with your children and
their games, for winter comes quickly; The matron of
the frozen kisses fears no man.

Come play now while the warmth of the sun
ebbs from this world’s veins.
Dance your macabre tricks and treats.

Or, go your way and leave us be. We care not.
For we shall sleep and dream slow dreams
of world endings and rebirthing, shadows cast
from a fire’s glow.”

I am rooted, transfixed. Unable to move or breathe,
lest I ruin the spell.

I sit here and recall both
blessing and regret
not far from conscious thought;
the steam behind my spinning gears of
sleepless nights.

I lay here and dream
of yellowed mountain aspen
and silvery moonlit snows;
when the noises dim and
peace returns, silent and firm,
the stone underneath.

Give me spoons to scoop up the chill,
saving oceans of cool for some hot day,
with a single cloud for whipped cream.

Give me a day when I can dream
of summer’s last fade;
a hint of winter’s deja vu.

Good Boy!

Let me rest in a field of crimson
untarnished, blessed with cool breezes, and
where wolves run free and sleep is easy,
unashamed of the beauty of stars.

Let me listen to the maracas of rattlesnakes
and the faint breath of hummingbirds, unseen.

On that evening when my last sunburn’s tinge cools
in the breeze of an offshore thought, I will want
to sit by my thoughts
one last time;
mindful that the bitter taste of not going home again
will taint my inner voice.

It is then that I may sing some blue measure of
Life’s song, metered by inches always far too short.
But that is not this evening.

Today, I just ask for a spot in the brightness, where
I can write my own happy ending and find
ladders in the clouds,
or nothing,
or something undescribed by mortals.

Save me a spot in the brightness
with a map
and a compass
and new terrain to explore.

Grinding a new razor, newly minted in the spinning machinations
with greasy air and dim lights, grinding an edge.
But the edge has been ground too many days; the center
won’t hold. And when it’s consumed, what was the point of
all that grinding?

You will be polished until the mirror
shines dimly of its own light.
You will proudly sing the old
songs until your lungs bleed and your voice
fades into the rhythm of just noise.
Freedom tantalized and unreached. Reflections
are lies scattered to the shadows.

Unfinished grinding, after all these ages gone. Work
just for the sake of work. Do stuff, faster.

Monkeys on bicycles, going too fast with nowhere in particular to be.

Rave
Stand in the end of the dock
and let it fly back into the storm-furied foam.

Rave
Hurl fist-fulls of storm-washed air
back into the maelstrom to encourage higher waves.

Mourn
All your lost loves and dead dreams
as the storm shatters your safe, beachfront world.

Wail
The injustice of life smothers spontaneity,
so a cry for a sympathetic response from the remorseless storm.

“Where have you been? Your clothes are soaked and it’s freezing outside!”

“Just a walk on the beach, honey.” An enigmatic smile.

And to her it’s just a silly game I play. Rave, mourn, wail. Just don’t let her see me doing it, lest the facade falls.

And touching those cold stones,
touching those cold stones.

Playing memories in our minds like old phonographs
with bits of conversation, skip, a smile, skip,
a sage rejoinder, a joke, skip…
frustrated by nuance only dimly conjured.

And touching those cold stones
touching those cold stones

Add a stone to the pile there,
speechless, let it feel like a prayer.
Then let the balloon fly high on the wind
to find another far, green country.

Saying goodbye, and
touching these cold stones.