Death, grief, and my Aunt Shirley

Growing up my Uncle Jake lived with my family off and on throughout the early years of my memory, this to me

was not out of the ordinary, since the in and out of his presence had always been. My Uncle Jake had been my Dad’s troubled little brother for almost as long as I can remember. The closer proximity in our ages and my Dad’s paternal view of him always made him feel like ½ uncle and ½ big brother to me. Eventually he brought home a girl who I thought was spectacular, ½ aunt and ½ big sister. 

Jake married Shirley when I was old enough to remember and adore her. She had deep blue eyes, long brown hair, and cheeks that were perpetually rosy. 

My adolescence was unremarkably colored by the teenage angst that consumes many of us. A wish to be in any life but the one we’ve been given. The future, a destination unclear, led by a pathway unclear. The overwhelming sense that  to get there would take too long made my young mind look for easier and earlier exits from what at the time, felt like a world of mostly pain. I had started to take this exit plan more seriously than my plans for the future. Then, my aunt Shirley asked me to help babysit her two young kids while she ran some errands. I agreed and spent the day holding a 9 month old bald little boy and making friends with a toddler that I had only seen here and there since she was an infant herself. After Shirley ran her errands she came back and we all hung out together until the kids needed their naps. 

Later, after dropping me off, when they were driving away, Shirley texted me that her toddler had started crying due to missing me. Some time later I overheard a conversation between my mother and Shirley where Shirley told her that she thought I was “totally awesome” which, if you knew her, was said with her characteristic bright eye smile. I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it in her voice, I knew she meant it. 

At that moment I realized that if I were to die, my Aunt Shirley would be devastated. More than that though, I realized that my Aunt Shirley was just one of maybe 100 people that I could count who I hadn’t even considered writing a goodbye note to, who would also be devastated. I realized that the string of my short life had been woven so  thoroughly into so many people’s tapestries that there really was no way to know how many lives would be partially undone by it’s ending. 

I couldn’t then end my life, not because of my Aunt Shirley, but because of what she represented: the people who had passed through my life, the people who lived on the periphery, and the people who loved me in ways too small to say but too big to not be felt. 

Last week a small thread in the tapestry of my life was extinguished. I had only known of him, and then had the great pleasure of talking to him a few times. He had almost been more of a concept than a person. Almost. And then he was gone. No goodbyes, no clear cause, no sickness or clear health issues that might lead one to brace for it. Being sent the obituary felt like a punch in the gut. He had been from Texas, so the link with the  news of his passing had an option to donate so his family could bring his body home. Being a poor grad student I was partially embarrassed at how low of a contribution I could afford to make, those who had donated before me had much more impressive numbers, but after I entered my credit card information there was a small box for a comment. There hadn’t been any comments yet, and I hadn’t been very close with him, so I didn’t have any grand stories of his life to tell. I said the only thing that I felt I could “My heart goes out to all who knew him, he was a light.” and he was. A contagious laugh, a zest for life, a dedication to our shared profession. I checked back a couple days later to see a thread of almost 100 comments on the page. I barely noticed the dollar amounts next to it. Flowery language, personal stories, heartfelt condolences to his family, and entire messages in his native tongue lit up the page like a morbid yearbook signing. The stories were beautiful but my tears didn’t spill over until I got to a line that read “I am so sorry, my brother”. Six words. But what else can you say? All the love and devotion and respect that this situation demands is right there, in those last two words. A dozen messages of people who didn’t know him well, or had only known him briefly, his own Aunt Shirlys. 

As I have survived my adolescence now, and move further into my adulthood I know that there will be more. More lives I interweave with, more that interweave with mine, and more that leave and end, until eventually mine will too. I wish I got to read my own obituary yearbook, to see the people left feeling the space that love leaves when it goes. But I will be content with knowing that there will be hundreds of Aunt Shirleys each feeling the pull of the threads we each weave when we choose to live and love and grieve.