My Aunt Mary died today. I just sent her a letter the other day, it can’t have arrived yet. I hope that my cousins read it, and know how much I loved their mom. I just got her Christmas card today! Today! One hour before the tragic e-mail! With a twenty-dollar bill taped in it! Have a treat on me! And me, sixty-one years old! Still her little nephew!
No offense to the living, but she was by far and away my favorite relative, one of only two whose blood I was proud to have coursing in my veins. And she was a symbol to me as well, proof that adversity could be triumphed over, proof that fate could be defeated, not only defeated, by smashed utterly, trampled in the dust of a world of one’s own making. She was a God.
There are heroes among us, and today one fewer in their number. When some people die, it can be said: good riddance. When some people die, it can be said: their suffering is over. When some people die, it can be said: maybe they can be happy now. When some people die, like my (redacted, but it rhymes with “smother my jaw”), their own sister can stand at the casket and say: maybe now you won’t have to be mad at everybody all the time anymore. But when some people die, everybody who knew them is shattered, and wonders how it will be possible to go on, and a light goes out in the world, an un-replaceable calculus is removed from the board, and the entire game is poorer for it, forever.
And as if to mock me, the setting sun, a rare display in my environs, the vast copper disk, fading into cloud cover, carrying away the souls of the faithful departed, replaced by the pathetic moon, a sad reminder of what we have lost.
Would that I had more to offer her memory than the tear stained blog post of a moron. She was everything to me.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAmU-PhSWVs
Special dedication. Take it easy ol'boy.
Fred,
She still is everything to you.(Not was.) I hope you saved the twenty as a reminder of her. I'm not a faithful, religious man, but I've always remembered something that Joseph Campbell said: " Life is eternal through the power of memory." Whenever you despair, think of the memory of your aunt.
I'll be keeping the twenty. In fact, I still have the last, previous twenty, I'd been carrying it for good luck. Double good luck, I like Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson too!
Lot's of people will remember her fondly, and I'll certainly still consult my thoughts of her when despair comes around on the wheel. That may be what heroes are for.
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