Loss

January 29, 2019

The cold winter has asserted itself in a brutal frontal assault.  The snow fell yesterday and the cold moved in today.  7 inches (17 2/3 cm) dropped over about 6 1/2 hours. Today the sun is out but the temperature is merely 11 degrees and the wind is blowing at 10-15 mph.  By nightfall the temperature will be below 0 F.  Yup, this is winter.

Yesterday my office closed because of the snow.  All the schools including the community college closed. My sons were headed for a dental visit but that did not occur because the dentist closed up shop at noon and went home. I am talking weather but I am thinking about life and death.

Day before yesterday one of my two remaining aunts died.  She had far outlived the prognosis the physicians had given her.  Through it all she seemed to approach life with joy.  Aunt Kitty was a happy person, the kind of person who saw the good not the bad in pretty much everyone.  She might have an aside but it was cautionary as opposed to character challenging.  

With as large a family as I come from it is wrong to imply that one or another aunt or uncle was a favorite.  What I will say is that she was one of three of my mother’s sisters who really was in my life and touched by life.  Aunt Kitty and Aunt Sugar were the two that really were kind of guideposts on living this life.  Aunt Sugar raised me for a number of years during the day so my mother could return to her work as a school teacher.  Aunt Kitty was the Aunt with whom my family socialized most frequently.  She was quiet, but joyful.  She tried to accommodate. She tried to nurture.

God what a hole in the fabric of the universe, of my universe, she will leave. I wish I could tell you some anecdotes or tales of family apocrypha involving Aunt Kitty but I can’t.  All I can tell you is that when I think of what a normal middle class woman of the late 20th century should have been, she was the archetype.