THE OLD AUNT
He
couldn’t stay for the funeral. He and
his wife had to leave in the morning, first thing, and there wouldn’t be time
even to come to the church. But they did
attend the wake the night before. And
they were with her when she died. Not literally
at her bedside, because she had died during the night while they were in bed
sleeping. But they had been with her all
that day and part of the evening, though she was not conscious. The last time she was aware was when she
arrived at their sister’s house for the afternoon barbecue and family
festivities. She had gotten from her own
house, with help from her nephew, down the steps and across the front of the
house to the driveway and into the car.
It was only a fifteen-minute drive, but during those fifteen minutes
something happened. She had an aneurism
in the blood vessel behind her heart, and though it hadn’t ruptured, something
happened that put her in grave pain and made her feel like she was dying. When
her nephew reached his sister-in-law’s house, they had a difficult time getting
her out of the car and into the living room, where she collapsed onto the
couch. They called an ambulance, which
arrived in just a few moments, and she was whisked away. At the emergency room, the doctor showed them
the CAT scan and pointed to the aneurism to show them how enlarged it had
become. The doctor said it would burst
any moment and that death was imminent, and they were helpless to do anything
except keep her comfortable and out of pain.
They managed to get her moved to a hospice where the nurses kept her
free of pain and comfortable, though she was seldom conscious. She lived two more days, and they spent both
days and evenings with her. But they had
to leave the morning of the funeral, and so they said their goodbyes to all who
came to the wake the night before, and in the morning they left for JFK. They had to be at the airport three hours
before flight time because of all the security now-a-days, and he remarked that
if not for that they might have been able to attend the church service at
least. His wife remarked that they were
there in spirit, and he felt better.
She was eighty-seven when she died. She had never married. She outlived all but one sibling, the sister
with whom she lived after her sister’s husband died. This sister was three years older than
her. They lived together in the family’s
old summer cottage near Lake Ronkonkoma.
This cottage had begun life as a two room bungalow and had over the
years been added to, first on one side, then on the other, and then had another
story built on top, and then had a huge room added to the front of the
building, so that looking at that house today made one rather dizzy, but it was
warm and comfortable for the two old ladies who lived in it.
He and his wife had come to Long Island
expressly to see his old aunts, and another old uncle and his wife who lived
much closer to the city. He felt that if
he didn’t come this summer, he might not see one or another or perhaps even all
of them alive again. His wife agreed
they should go. They had spent one whole
day with his two aunts in their old hodgepodge house and then had gone to his
sister’s where he and his wife were staying during the visit. He took many photos and videos with his
little digital camera during that visit, and his brother-in-law was in fine
form, and he recorded numerous laughs and took many photos. The next time he saw his aunt was at his
sister’s house when she had collapsed on the couch. They took her away in the ambulance, and he
was never able to talk with her again.
Even
during those rare moments when she became conscious she couldn’t speak and he
wasn’t sure she knew who he was. She did
know she was dying, and her energies were absorbed by that. She wanted no interventions when this time
came, and her wishes were heeded. The
nurses brought pain medications, which worked efficiently, but which also kept
her asleep most of the time. She died in
her sleep.
She was buried in the same plot as her
brother and his wife, a plot intended for four, though it was unlikely anyone
else would be buried there. It was just
the three of them. The headstone was
modest, purchased by her sister-in-law for her brother, since he was the first
to go. After her brother died, she lived
with her sister-in-law for a bit over ten years, and when her sister-in-law
herself had died, she went to live with her own sister, whose husband had only
just died. Her generation was nearing
its end, a fact which she not only accepted, but which she heartfully yearned
for, feeling every day as though she were marking time, waiting for the
inevitable, and feeling every day more and more impatient with the delay.
This is why she had a living will made in
which she specifically requested no life saving measures be used for her when
her time came. She also disposed of her
worldly belongings, which were slight, she never having earned much beyond a
daily living. But she did save enough to
leave a little something to her nieces and nephews, for remembrance’s
sake.
Now she was gone, and as he settled into
his seat next to his wife on the plane, he thought about her, he thought about
her and his mother and father and his aunts and uncles, almost all of whom were
now gone. There were five children in
his mother’s family and five in his father’s, though one of them had died very
young, so that he only knew three of his father’s siblings. He thought of them and the lives they
made. They were all children when the
great stock market crash of 1929 occurred, and when the second war broke out,
all the men went. With enormous good
fortune these men all returned home, though some of them bore more heavy scars
than others. They had all finished high
school, and had either just before the war, during the war, or immediately after
coming home from the war had married and begun having children. He thought of himself being born exactly at
that time when the RAF had begun to clear the Luftwaffe out of the skies over
London. He was not a baby boomer, he
reflected, but a war baby.
The lives his aunt and her brothers and sisters and
brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law lived will be remembered as a golden age in
American life, an age that was now really and in fact dying away and will live only
in memory until his own generation’s time comes. And then only readers will know of it. If there are readers then in that new world
we hover on the edge of becoming.
The hum of the engines filled his mind as he closed his eyes
and let his thinking take what shape free association gave it. How he felt sandwiched between his parents’ world
and his children’s world! He could look
back upon all the faces he grew up with, see them as youthful, as they once
were, and as elderly, as they had become, and as very old, as most of them
became. But he could not see the faces
of his children and his grandchildren much beyond who they were at this very
moment. And that’s the rub, he
thought. All life looks backward, or
homeward, out of necessity, and out of necessity must grind out of the present
day another moment to add to that homewardness.
Tomorrow has a shape that we must name “tomorrow,” which no waiting ever
brings to us. He thought of his aunt and
how she wanted to die, eighty-seven and frail, with no “tomorrow” to name
except more pain.
What did he want?
Thinking of his aunt inevitably brought him to this question. What did he want? To live forever, of course! To not be subject to what his aunt was
subject to! What his parents and his
aunts and uncles were subject to. But
what if he got his wish? He thought of
the legend of Sybil and her response to the question, “What do you want?” She asked the god Apollo for immortality,
which he granted. And when asked “What
do you want?” so many generations later that she had become a bag of bones
hanging from the lintel of Apollo’s temple, she replied, “I want to die.” He knew the wisdom of his aunt was wise. So, what did he want? To live forever? Yes!
And No! Of course! He was stuck in this vibrating motion when he
opened his eyes. His wife beside him
also had her eyes closed. But the shade
on the window was up, and the sun shone down upon the earth, and he could see
the countryside as they flew over it.
It always impressed him, seeing the human shape of the land
from so high in the sky—the checkerboard patterns of the corn and soybean
fields, the huddled villages, the lakes and rivers, the shelter belts—from the
air it all had the appearance of transitoriness, as of life fleeting, ever
shifting in its patterns, yet, after the first glances, it all had a solidity
and permanence that contradicted that impression. It was, he knew, an emblem of his
meditation. He could not fight it.
He looked at his wife.
She was calm, resting back in her seat.
All the men in his family, on both sides, predeceased their wives. He wondered if that pattern would cross to
the next generation. Very likely, he
thought. Why would it be different?
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