I was always very, very careful. I smiled and sat on her lap and listened to her stories. I carefully let her love on me. I carefully loved her back. My mother loved her Aunt with a monstrous capacity. I felt this before I realized it. I knew it the way only a child can know. I saw it in their every day encounters, in their tidy lunches and sweet sharing of record albums... Lawrence Welk, show tunes and Elvis among them.
Grace's conversations, in her last years, bored me. Always about the "lovely roll she had for breakfast. Well, half... the other half would be wonderful with a cup of tea for lunch" or "do you hear the phrasing in this music? The lilting of the voice?". I was in college, then. Her gaudy trinkets alarmed me. Her touch was not welcome. I visited less. My mother visited daily.
She became ill. Silently, savagely, painfully, ill. Never diagnosed, but we assumed a form of cancer. And, quite quickly, she was gone.
This woman who had fought from the beginning, who had loved others' children as her own, who had survived a marriage others would have fled from... gone.
My cousins and I gathered at the back of the small town funeral home and, suddenly, massively, we were crying. My tall-stilt of an Uncle appeared in the frame of the doorway. He wrapped us in his long and lanky arms and looked us each in the eye. "I know", he said, "this is the beginning of many endings for you all. Soon, there will be more funerals. This is the start of death for this group of our family and it is so hard. I know."
That was it, really. My Uncle, the man who climbed telephone poles and strung wire and smiled when others failed to, had stated the obvious. We dried our eyes and took our seats in the small viewing room. I sat, for the first and not last time, in the white, straight backed chair of that room and averted my eyes from her casket. I imagined her happy somewhere, anywhere else but here. I tucked my near-tears inside my pounding brain and constructed stories that became memories that I can find inside my head to this very day. It was a trick I designed at Grace's funeral. A trick that has gotten me through too many similar good-byes in my life.
I returned to college and received daily phone calls from my mom, who struggled with Great Aunt Grace's passing. She and my Grandmother and the other family women separated her belongings, and my mother came home with the lot of salt and pepper shakers and her album collection. The shakers were carefully placed in her china cabinet in matching sets of memories,and the albums were lined on the shelves of her den.
I blame you, Grace. You started it all. The tears and the aching- insides. The longing and the not knowing how to say a good-bye. The albums of photos are in my possession now. I see us collected on those pages at family reunions and baptisms and birthday parties. None of those photos show us collected at funerals, because you were never there to take the photo. You, Grace- you started it all.
