This is not an obituary. It’s my own take on my Aunt Bev and
why she was so special.
If you were stranded on a desert island with my mom, you
would survive. She’d figure out how to build a hut, and you’d work your fingers
to the bone making it. She’d want
to look at the sunset and the shells and the flowers, but there wouldn’t be
time. If you were stranded on that same island with her sister, my Aunt Bev,
you’d be busy looking at the sunset, the shells and the flowers. And then you'd find something else wonderful to look at.
And then a storm would whip up, and you’d be clinging to life wishing Mom was
there to help. That’s how I always saw the two.
My aunt took a brave leap of faith some time in 1967, I’m
guessing it was. She and my mom had lost their mom, and their dad who emigrated
here from an unknown country had died many years before. My mom was a young
mom, but Bev was single and I guess ready for an adventure. She left the
familiarity of East Galesburg, Illinois, with family and some good friends
nearby for the unknown. She never married. She never had children. She had a
shot at marriage at least once. I was a grade schooler and she’d come back for
a visit and a local man came to the house to take her on a date. He brought
flowers. My mom really wanted her to like this man and live closer to us. But
it wasn’t going to happen, she was not interested. I was a little sad about that, because I wanted her
nearby too, but happy that I would still have this exotic aunt from a land
far away. California.
When she visited us, her suitcase would always be filled with surprises for us. She
loved sparkly things and wore very big rings, at least for our taste at the time in the
cornfields of Altona. She was a
large woman who almost always wore black, and girdles back when they were
girdles and not shapers. Sometimes she’d wear two. She liked frosty eyeshadow,
and she liked to put her hair in rollers but didn’t like to brush out the
definition from the rollers too much. You could look at her hair and see almost
exactly where each roller had been. Sometimes she’d swirl the little tendrils
at the side into a lollipop shape and pin them with a clip. Even her
handwriting was swirly. She had the most unusual, artful handwriting I’ll ever
see. There was cursive and then there was her cursive. Uber, mega, super
cursive. She was curvy. It all made sense. Her curves made for good hugs, and, as I would consider us non-huggers up until lately, it was a nice change.
Her suitcase would have an endless supply of interesting
items and when I was in the 5th grade, I learned that those interesting
items were just a sampling of a house filled with interesting items. I lived
with her for a summer and was too young to realize that the boxes piled high to
the ceiling and rooms with literally a narrow pathway through them was a
symptom of mental illness. Years later, it was high school graduation time. The
graduation party had barely ended. but my bags were packed. I was leaving for
California the next day and would live with my Aunt Bev for awhile and
establish a residency and then go to college there. And then the phone rang.
Aunt Bev couldn’t or wouldn't talk to me. I stared at a plate of leftover mints while I
listened to mom’s end of what was a somber conversation. There were lots of
“uh-huhs, and okays” and I knew I was about to learn something very bad. It
seemed the trinkets and treasures in my Aunt’s house were apparently packed a
little too close to the water heater and there was a small fire. When the
landlord saw how she had lived, he immediately evicted her. My great uncle, who
lived nearby and helped my aunt a lot through the years, brought in a dumpster and
cleaned out her house and helped her find a new place. He found thousands of
dollars tucked in books and bags. Hundreds and hundreds of other things. She
was a collector. I know he was frustrated with her, and my mom and sister were, too, a few years later when they flew out to clean out a different apartment so that she wouldn't lose it. Despite all the work they did, about a year later Randy and
I and Krystal and Sofie flew out to move her into some rent controlled housing
for older people or people with special healthcare needs. I could barely see
the tracks of the work my mom and sister and others had just done. I hate the term
hoarding because it’s just an ugly-sounding word and I feel people have been trivialized on TV, but that’s the word we use, I guess. It was severe.
Severe. Hundreds of ink pens. Maybe 50 bottles of Flonase. You’d come across an
envelope, it might have a note inside, a napkin, a sugar packet, a gift tag
that had a pretty design on the front, and maybe a check or a 20 dollar bill.
There were dozens of these types of envelopes, filled with treasures and what
the rest of us might call trash. Things were packed inside of other things inside
of other things. You get the idea. But we managed to move her into a new one room apartment so the
ability to collect was greatly reduced, or so I thought. Plus there were meals
available in the cafeteria. There would be people to check on her. So many positives. I thought
this would change her. I was so naïve.
I’m sorry to say that as our life with Sofie became more
complicated I really lost touch with her. When mom called to say Bev was in the
hospital and it wasn’t good at all, I rushed out there as soon as I could. In a
matter of hours, she went from talking to the emergency room doctors telling
them she just wasn’t feeling good to being put on life support. It seems she
had a bloodstream infection and cirrhosis, not from drinking but probably diet.
I got there late at night and stayed until the early morning hours. She wasn’t
good at all, but in just a few more hours, the septic shock had completely declared
itself. When I walked back into her room later that morning, the nurse shook
her head and said they’d had a bad morning, and they had. The doctor
recommended withdrawing life support and transitioning her to comfort care. I
talked to mom and we agreed. She died within minutes of stopping the IV blood
pressure medicines. It was devastating, as losing a loved one always is. But
she did not die alone.
I went to where she lived to gather her things. She had been
moved into their skilled nursing facility a few months ago. They had dismantled
her regular apartment a month ago, and she had told the housekeeping staff to take
what they wanted and throw out the rest. It was so ironic that there would
just be two small bags of her things. Mostly papers and letters she had written
but not mailed. Later that night, I went through the papers trying to piece
together her life as of late. Her swirly handwriting was ever present, but you
could see some tremor in some of the loops. She didn’t always finish sentences.
Some sentences didn’t make sense. I saw where she had jotted down, I love my
sister and of course, I cried. She did love her sister and her family and
friends, and she loved life. Even at the end. Even a quality of life many of us
would think didn’t contain a heck of a lot of quality, as she was mostly
confined to a bed. Still, she wanted to live to see all the beauty and
sparkles yet in life. Even her heart was “bling-y”, for it too, was a heart of
gold.
As the stack of bills and statements and half-written
letters and notes dwindled, and I was opening one of the last envelopes, I
caught a little blur of something that almost resembled a tiny feather float its way
down onto my hotel mattress. Turned out not to be a feather but a perfectly preserved
violet that had been tucked away, for no other reason other than it was
beautiful. And it was. And that would be my Aunt Bev.
