In Memoriam

In Memoriam 

It’s not an obituary—many of my blogposts end up being way more about me than I would like them to be.  I note this at the outset, because this post is of a very specific nature and I wish to express the significance of the person as selflessly as I can.  I’m in this weird space of my own life where things just happen now, and sometimes it takes days before I can make sense of the relevance.  This was the case on Thursday morning when I received a text from my mother that stated: “Dad got a call from Aunt Betty that Aunt Shirley passed away this morning.  We don’t know any more than that.”

After a day, thoughts started to come to me, and I thought particularly about the “we don’t know any more than that.”    So, I figured I would share some things that I did know.  I may get details slightly inaccurate, but this is what I remember. Aunt Shirley was from Virginia, and had an unmistakable southern accent, distinct from my Grandmother’s other sisters.  She sent my brother and I Christmas gifts every year.  There is a cookbook from Virginia still in my Mother’s house with unmistakably Southern recipes that are probably taking years off of my life.  She had an angelic voice, if she had been born in New York she might have been an opera singer.  I know she sang in the church.

I know that she married John Parker, and they raised her only son Jimmy.  I never knew John.  My Father tells me that he was a good guy.  I never knew cousin Jimmy.  He passed away after briefly surviving a car accident in 1970.  The Aunt Shirley that I knew often came to visit with her sister Betty, or with her friend Jim Steele.  They made it to my brother’s wedding, where we secretly discussed Virginia going blue for Obama, away from other family.  I was at the reception dinner with Val and my eldest son Aiden who was probably no more than one.  She asked me when I was getting married, and told me that I had better “get to it” because it was getting harder to travel.  In a month Val and I married quietly at the Justice of the Peace, to no fanfare.  I know that she probably would have traveled even for something like that.

A few years ago, her friend Jim passed.  I remember my Father consoling her on the phone, and saying specifically that “Jim was family.”  I regret that we did not live closer.  I don’t know much about the last few years and I regret that I won’t be able to attend her service.  Aunt Shirley could not make it to her sister’s service (my Grandmother) due to weather and recent surgery. This was somewhere around 2000. She made it to multiple weddings after this date.  And she visited my Grandmother in the declining years of Alzheimer’s long after my Grandmother forgot her, because this is what you do. 

My Grandmother’s service was a small affair, very few people, which is what happens when you outlive everyone.  At 21 this made me profoundly sad.  Part of the purpose of my writing is that Aunt Shirley also outlived many of the prominent figures in her life, but she had even less family than my Grandmother.  I’m sure it weighed on her that she could not make the service.  But, around this time she sent her yearly Christmas gift which included the unpublished manuscript that my Grandmother had written following the death of her youngest son Neil (my uncle).  This was ten times more meaningful.

I remember her sense of humor and her warmth.  She loved music.  I have a memory of her sitting in my room.  I must have been in high school because I remember she was inquisitive about my taking up the guitar.  “You know, my Jimmy was in a band.”  She said softly, proudly.  

She was a character, you could just tell.  Last year she contacted my Father and announced that she was getting married.  There was understandable concern, following Jim’s recent passing.

As I conclude here—I want to get to the heart of why Aunt Shirley was so relevant to me today--the what occurs to me after a few days.  I am pretty sure, that I am that character in my family.  I suspect I will be like that oil tycoon who met the playmate who took half his fortune. Why not get married in your 90's?  I am pretty sure it is precisely that spirit which allows you to live 90 plus years in a life that often did not go as hoped or planned.  At 40, that’s me.  She’s my family model of finding hope, year after year despite the tragedies.  She did that for nearly a century.  I can only hope I have strength like that—that I’m still invited to weddings at 85 and still traveling to make them.  There are days where a stubborn part of me cannot give up on an afterlife, probably out of hope. I need there to be a place where one goes to see the face of your only child whom you have missed for fifty years.  That is my hope for her.

She was family.  She was my type of family.