Deciding what was worth keeping and what could be (had to be) thrown away in the immediate aftermath of her existence was bad enough, but knowing most of it would end up in the trash made it extra heart-breaking. We are a small clan, this family; there isn’t a lot of “posterity” out there for whom things must be saved, handed down, kept for the sake of anything or anyone. My aunt never married, had no children. I’ve been told there were a few marriage proposals in her younger days, but she never accepted. She liked her privacy. She was a sweet woman with tremendous empathy she offered to the people around her on a daily basis, but she was just salty enough to where it might be said that at the end of the day, in her personal life at least, she preferred to be left the fuck alone.
I’m not a crier, for the most part, and I had already coped with her death before it came, already made my peace – as I think she had – with the finality of her diagnosis and the futility of her prognosis. She was 80, and had made the decision not to seek treatment, opted out of waging an unwinnable war, and while she was not entirely unmoved by this decision – none of us were – it seemed, by the breathlessly labored words she spoke those last couple of times I saw her, that she stood by it. There is much solace to be drawn from a resolve of that magnitude, facing that level of consequences.
So I had prepared myself for the inevitability of her death. I even wished, privately, for it to come quickly, a merciful release from her now broken mortal coil long before the three months the doctors had given her. I got my wish. Barely three weeks from diagnosis to death, and relatively little physical pain. A few of those breathless words, of love and support - from all of us - then nothing.
Which, when you think about it, kind of sums up life.
But walking into her room that afternoon, I was hit with a wind blast of sadness that stole my breath and weakened my knees. For a moment, just a short moment, I felt I could not move, lest I fall. There before me was a final snapshot of her life, like ancient ruins mysteriously abandoned in a flash by a forgotten civilization: her little packages of candy waiting to be eaten (one of them started, never to be finished), a small pile of bills waiting to be paid, a calendar planner with appointments penciled in on several dates in March. But no Dorothy. Just five cardboard boxes graciously provided by the nursing home for her belongings, set in a row on the bed that would soon be someone else's. My son, accompanying me for this grim task and similarly coping with the loss internally, in small, measured doses, felt the same thing at the exact same moment.
“This just turned really shitty really fast,” he muttered, his voice noticeably agitated.
The room itself was no help for the task at hand. It was kept warm and stuffy, presumably to protect residents from chill, and heavily perfumed, a floral odor so sickeningly thick it was practically condensing on the edge of the furniture. The anemic sunlight of this February afternoon – leap day, no less – drizzled through the window and positioned itself cleanly on the linoleum floor. Through that window I could see a small courtyard, crusted over with late-season snow, and a bird feeder. No visitors this afternoon. Fastened to the glass, some religious window clings, those infantilized-looking Christian images of Jesus, lambs and crosses that normally adorn the walls and windows of the children of the faithful at Easter. My aunt was Jewish, but I think at the end, she was just extremely faithful.
I had only visited her three times in the four years she lived at this nursing home. Two of those visits were in the last week, coming home after receiving word of her illness, and both were kept short. She was weak, noticeably more so the second time, had difficulty speaking and breathing, difficulty sitting up. She was facing physical challenges that, in hindsight, may have been the beginning of her body relinquishing its command of her essence.
The other visit was three years earlier, when she first moved in. At that time, she was still the aunt Dorothy I’d always known, the sweet and salty woman with the tremendous empathy and sharp tongue. We spent some time in the commons area talking, and although a move to a nursing home is never cause for celebration, the news was not all bad...sort of encouraging actually. She’d only been there a week or two, and was already rocking bingo and the Wii Bowling competition, had met some people and taken to being concerned for their well-being, as was her way.
It became clear that life in this nursing home, like life anywhere, at any age, was what you made it. Yes, this was an aggregation of people living with hardship, in their twilight years, and more or less at the mercy of much younger people you could only assume - and hope - were kind, patient and empathetic as they did their jobs. But if you were social, relaxed a little, tried to walk on the sunny side of the street, and lucky enough to a) still have your faculties, b) not have constant physical pain, then you didn’t have to be alone, didn't have to be lonely, and in that moment, the thought of growing old wasn't so upsetting to me, and the oft-quoted words of Tennyson's "Ulysses" flashed into my mind:
“It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles, and see the great Achilles whom we knew. Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are…”
Obviously, Aunt Dorothy had placed herself well within her new community and circumstances. She appreciated my visit; we had a nice chat, traded some memories from my childhood, of which I have many that involve her. I updated her on my new life three hours away, on my children (almost grown), and she was happy to hear that, for the most part, the news was good there too.
But when I brought her back to her room, helped her out of the wheel chair, she began to cry - wet, long sobs that perhaps had been on the horizon the whole day.
“I’m sorry,” she wept, looking up at me with blurry wet eyes full of guilt, because we are raised to be ashamed of our tears, to peg those who cry as “criers”, even though each and every one of us is outfitted at birth with the impulse. “I’m sorry…!”
“Dorothy no, please, don’t be…” I stammered, completely at a loss for how I might go about comforting her, helping her cope with this sudden emotional switch. I realized quickly that I couldn’t. She was dealing with an implacable enemy; a larger, unmanageable (and totally inconvenient) truth, the kind that makes criers out of us all, suddenly was in the room with us: the child Dorothy had once lavished attention on, delighted in showering with gifts and taking on mini-road trips (in lieu of having her own children, I would one day realize…), was now a 40-year-old man who just had wheeled her back to the last place she would ever call home.
It was a heady moment. For both of us.
Sifting through her belongings now was not just an emotional roller coaster, but a physical challenge. There was a lot of stuff in that room. She was a pack rat, delighted in sharing and receiving magazine and newspaper clippings, inspirational quotes, cute little cartoons, and saving all of it. I wanted to honor this vigilance by keeping every scrap, believing that if they had moved her enough so to save, they were in some way a part of her, and should be remembered.
But that simply isn’t practical, and that alone is a discouraging thought. As I write this, I'm sitting in my office, where I have my own collection of keepsakes and mementos, an entire room's worth of shit on the walls, in fact, that I've decided tells a story about me, a kind of intellectual man cave I keep with the vigilance of a museum curator. It's lovely. I like being in here, like writing in here, like the way the light looks on the walls as the afternoons become evenings. But I know that for all the thought I've put into what goes on these walls, or on display on these shelves, when my time comes, most of it will cease to matter, and someone will have no choice but to dispose of it.
But my aunt Dorothy was a writer, like everyone in our family, and among her magazine clippings and greeting cards, her subjective collection of other people’s words and sentiment, were countless stories she herself had penned. And this was a horse of an entirely different color.
Her writing style was simple – testament to her years as a newspaper reporter - her stories sweet parables with lessons she felt a compulsion to share, without intending to preach. And as I went through them, took a moment to read a few, I realized to my amazement that she was writing them right up until the end.
I was already impressed that after retirement, after leaving the newspaper where she had worked for thirty years, and then moving into the nursing home, she kept writing. In fact, she wrote for the facility’s monthly newsletter, had a little column that had a little readership. But here, sorting out her things, I discovered that she was writing even after her diagnosis. There was one still in the works, a St. Patrick's Day fable planned for publication in the newsletter in March, which my brother had the honor of reading aloud during our last visit with her.
And that I was profoundly moved by. It is what being a writer is all about. It’s easy to write when you’re young and healthy and full of time and opinions and still feel a largely unqualified sense of relevance, part of the stories you’re telling. It’s quite another matter to know you're living your final years, able to see the rocky shoreline of your existence appearing through the mist, and still write.
And it's quite ANOTHER matter, still, to realize you're about to crash onto the rocks of that shoreline, potentially in a matter of days not months, and still write. Write straight through to your last moment. Your last breath.
For better or worse, it is my small family’s legacy. My father, my son, my brother, even my mother, in days past, we all write. Seeing as writing is the only thing a) I’ve ever cared about, b) the good Lord deigned to make me any good at, I can only hope that I am as tenacious as my aunt Dorothy when my time comes.
I like to think I will be. As I navigate these stormy waters of transition - of my family, my body, my face, my priorities - I’m reminded of another line from Tennyson.
“Death closes all: but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done…”
My aunt Dorothy was proof of this. And she was, before all else, the best auntie anybody could ask for.
This picture, the expression on her face, says it all. Sweet and salty.
Not everything could be saved, Dorothy, but you will never be forgotten.
