Unexpected Death in the Family

My aunt. She was 95, so why was her death unexpected? Well, she was one of those you think may live forever. She was my dad's only remaining sibling. I got the news, and dreaded having to tell him. He took it stoically. I expected that, but I know he will grieve in his own way and in private. His family, those Germans, they put on that brave face.

This aunt was a complicated lady. She was not warm and fuzzy. She was kind of a rock, really. Judgmental. Prudish. Stubborn. Even a little mean sometimes, but she was also the image of my paternal grandmother. I know this from pictures. Tiny women, both of them, with thin gray hair and round faces. Merry eyes, but also piercing, intelligent. There was no fooling with this little woman, you didn't dare.

All that aside, she had friends all over the world. She had a male housekeeper, an Asian man, for 30 years. They went on missionary trips, she and her late husband of 60+ years. She once wrote a memoir and gave it to me to read and to give an opinion. I did a little editing on it. I think that irked her. I also told her I thought it could be published with a little bit more tweaking, adding some more details, fleshing it out some. I don't think she ever did that. Most of the time these things are done for posterity anyway, and to plump the family history. I'll probably dig out that memoir to read again, after all these years have gone by since I read it the first time.

A stroke is what took her. Finally. She'd been having mini ones for about 9 years. But the big one came last week, in the middle of a game of Chinese Checkers. Her memory was already not what it once was, and her partner, a little old lady friend in the assisted living home with her, had a memory that worked even less. The man who owns the home said they were fun to watch, when they played their daily games of Chinese Checkers. They would forget in the middle whose was which color, and whose turn was whose, until finally one or the other would declare them self the winner, and the game would be done.

And so another member of my family, a relic from my childhood, gone. I loved to go to their house, when I was a little girl. They had a daughter, a single child, my cousin whom I spoke with for over an hour this afternoon. She was a dear favorite of mine (still is) and of my brothers. They were one day apart in age, but she and I were both girls, in a family overloaded with boys. She had a love affair with horses during her childhood, collected horse figures, and had a shelf that ran all around the room about three feet from the ceiling where these horse figures resided. I thought she was completely cool. We still seem to have tons to talk about.

She lives in California -- they all did. But her work occasionally brings her to Texas. It did so a few years ago, right after my divorce was final. She spent a weekend with me. We talked for hours, never really got it all said. Strange how that works with some people. The local Czech festival was going on when she was here and we went to it, meet some cousins we really didn't know, distant cousins, maybe only half cousins. They were instantly like old friends. We ate Czech food, listened to Czech music, talked about our granny, who was Czech. My cousin knew Granny a little, was about 7 when she died. Whereas I was only a baby and have zero memories, but I inherited her eyes. My cousin also has those same eyes, and our hair is the same color as well. People at the Festival that day thought we were sisters.

I hate that all the people I grew up knowing are dying. But I think of how my dad must be feeling right now, just before 10 o'clock. He's the last of his immediate family. How lonely that must be.

Onward ....