My aunt died this morning. She was 85. She was also the baby of her family and the last surviving sibling of my mother. It’s funny to talk about the baby of a family being 85. We called her Auntie A (her older sister was Auntie B), a tradition started by my oldest sister Mary Ann who when she was small apparently couldn’t handle the words Helen or Vivian, and she loved being called that. My sister Louise went through a phase of calling her “Helen” and she didn’t like it – she liked being somebody’s aunt. My other aunt (Auntie B for those keeping count), her last surviving sibling, passed away ten years ago, and Auntie A’s husband passed away about a year and a half ago. This past year has been a very lonely time for her. An aneurysm near her heart burst this morning and she was gone. She had been in the hospital a few days, and the doctors let us know that she didn’t have long – three to six months. That was three days ago. So while we all made our plans to go up and see her (she was living in Watsonville, CA) she fooled us all and hightailed it out of here too fast for final goodbyes. So I’ll make this post my final goodbye to her.

My aunt was born in 1926 with a double-cleft palate. My grandparents were well-to-do enough to afford surgery to correct it, but when she described what was done to her, I always shuddered. Techniques to repair her defect were pretty brutal. I think she had over twenty surgeries by the time she was 17. The surgeries worked – if you looked at her you never noticed anything, she looked perfectly normal. But she always felt that my grandmother saw her as the flawed child and for all her life when she looked in the mirror all she saw was that gaping hole and it informed the course of her life. At 17 she entered the convent and spent the next 25 years serving God and teaching school. She left the convent in 1967 to my grandmother’s eternal dismay  as the world was going psychedelic and free love was the new cool thing. A fan of psychotherapy her whole life, she sampled pretty much every human potential movement that came along starting with est, started dating (and sharing probably too many details of her adventures with her young niece who lapped up all the gory details), drinking and generally behaving like the 17-year-old she has been when she entered the convent all those years before.

She spent her first year or two as a free woman living with some former IHM nuns in Salinas, then got a job teaching in San Jose and moved to Los Gatos. Living alone for the first time in her life, she found that she didn’t like it at all and decided to get married. Her first real boyfriend was an Albanian symbols for facebook” title=”music symbols for facebook”>music teacher and that relationship fell apart when they took their first vacation together – she got off the plane in Tahiti, took one look at him and that was the end. it was also the end of her traveling days. The next time out in the dating world, she met Harry, who was a recent widower, and married him two months later in her sister’s backyard. They were married over 30 years. Their marriage started out rocky (what marriage wouldn’t when you had only known each other two months?) and had some rough patches but over the years they became true companions, helping each other through the hurdles of old age and declining health.

I think I will remember best her enthusiasm for life – she was an avid searcher, for peace of mind, for answers to questions of faith. She was a Catholic to the day she died but once she left the convent she was on a constant quest to find a belief system that was bigger than Catholicism. She loved the Dalai Lama, Zen Buddhism and Gregorian chants. She was a liberal Democrat who always voted (absentee in her later years). She gave to UNESCO and the Red Cross and cried over every global catastrophe. it wasn’t until after my mom died and she left the convent that we finally got to know each other – and became good friends. She treated me like an adult and always listened, and never condescended or treated me like a loseWeight Exerciser teenager. Over the years, as I grew older and my memories of my mom started to fade she’d share her memories, and bring my mom back to life, at least for a little while. I would often go up and visit her  and we would have long conversations about life, the universe and everything. She loved to sing, especially folk songs along the lines of Michael Row Your Boat Ashore and Kumbaya with great gusto, and she could play the guitar – well enough at least to accompany herself while singing folk songs. She played a mean game of tennis into her 70’s. She loved to read, and when I gave her a Kindle about a year ago she took to it like a duck to water, and I think she secretly loved showing the other old folks in her residence how hip she was with her fantabulous ebook reader, though she never did quite grasp how I was able to send her books from my computer to her Kindle. She even surfed the Internet, sending out e-cards to everyone for their birthdays. We sometimes even video chatted when she could find the icon to click on to start iChat. :-) She loved to dress in artsy outfits that leaned toward the hippy-esque. She could paint though she never thought she was very good. She was a good aunt. We were family.

I’ll miss you a lot, Auntie A. Say hi to Mom and Auntie B for me.