Another Death in the Family
I got a call from my cousin this evening, telling me his mother, my father’s sister, just passed away. It’s not a surprise, really. She was in the neighborhood of 90 and had been unable to care for herself for some time.
And yet it knocks the wind out of me to think I will never again see my Aunt Florence.
She was the relative I felt closest to outside of my immediate family. Maybe that’s because if we’d been born in the same era, we would have been mistaken for twins. When I was seven or eight, my parents showed me a photograph and asked me who it was. “Me,” I declared with absolute certainty, wondering why my parents needed to ask. But, in fact, it was a picture of my aunt when she was seven or eight.
As a kid I spent summers with Aunt Florence. Grandpa would take me on a Greyhound bus from Chicago to Louisville. Uncle Paul would meet us at the station and drive us out to the country dwelling where I first fell in love with rural mailboxes—the flat-bottomed tin can on a post, with a little red flag on its side. You actually go for a walk down to the main road to collect your mail! Cool! (I finally got one of my own when I moved to Carroll County.)
In Kentucky, there was more green space for running around than anywhere else I’d ever stayed. And Aunt Florence devoted herself to my entertainment and well-being. She taught me to bowl (she was a champion bowler who made it look like ballet.), throw horseshoes, and got me to eat green peas by presenting me with a blue ribbon for eating every last one.
My aunt and uncle moved to Ohio around the time I turned into a teenager. They lived in an apartment complex with a community swimming pool! My aunt connected me with neighborhood kids. We’d spend hours in the pool, then go to my aunt’s for food. Aunt Florence was a child whisperer, I think.
I can recall when suppertime found me hunched over my plate with a death grip on a fork in my left hand and a knife in my right, carving and shoveling meat down my maw in one streamlined action. Aunt Florence taught me to steady the meat with the fork in my right hand while I cut it with the knife in my left—my dominant hand. Then lay the knife across the top of my plate, switch the fork from right to left, and thus guide the food into my mouth. From a survival standpoint, it doesn’t matter how I hold the utensils or ingest the food, but Aunt Florence’s mannerly method gave me a lifelong ability to slow down at mealtime and gracefully enjoy good company as well as sustenance.
When Aunt Florence died, I lost the last real connection to my parents’ generation. I might still have an aunt or uncle out there somewhere, but nobody with whom I communicate regularly.
It wasn’t that long ago that Aunt Florence still called me on the phone. I really don’t like talking on the phone, but for her I’d make an exception. She was having acute memory issues and could talk about the same two topics repeatedly for an hour. But that was okay. After the grace she granted —and taught—me, she deserved a little of her own.
I was already an orphan and a widow. Now I’m without anchor. Since my husband died, I’ve been plotting to relocate. Quite by coincidence, the town I intend to move to is named Florence.