Reading: Don Quijote

Watching: "Desk Set"

Moving: walked 2.5 miles

16 September 2002: Saying Goodbye

Saturday morning I woke up with wet eyes. In my dream ABW, HAO, and I were in my sister's restaurant. Someone tapped my shoulder and I turned to see BHM. He and I danced to Roxy Music--"Ain't That So?"--all kinds of huggy, and then he walked away. He and I never danced together; I'm not sure if he actually liked Roxy Music or just lived with my sister, who did (but he must have); and he died over a decade ago. Did he just visit me?

I've been steadier for the past few days, since then, or maybe just because it was the weekend I felt calmer. It's more likely I've just been thinking about him.

CLH and I were talking about death Tuesday (a while later, she said, "Okay, is there any other topic we should cover? World hunger?") and she told me again how what happened the night he died. She'd talked to him last the day before, when he said it was okay, that he'd never wanted to be old anyway, and that night she couldn't sleep. She watched her digital clock light red numerals through the night and into the morning, and the last time she saw before finally sleeping was 4:06. When his brother called the next day, she learned that had been the time of death. She has always thought that she kept that vigil with him despite their physical separation (Boston to Florida, where he'd moved to elude pneumonia) because of their connection.

I contributed our father's story of waking up from a sound sleep at 8:30 one morning, when he was away on a golf vacation. It was Saturday, January 12, 1991, and my mother and I had just taken Shadow to the vet without bringing her home afterward. It's a good story as far as it goes, I said to CLH last week, except, and she finished with me, "...when has Dad ever slept past 6:00 in his whole life."

We had this conversation Tuesday evening. RDC, Blake, and I three had just got back from camp, we'd emptied Cassidy into the living room, and I listened to voicemail from my mother and sister, then called my mother, and then my father, and his brother and that aunt where he was staying, and then my sister, while I staggered laundry and dishwasher loads and stopped feeling like I was hurtling along I-80 at 85 mph while being punched in the stomach sometime after midnight.

My aunt, the one I'm named after, died Monday as RDC and I sat peacefully by Leigh Lake. My father and sister were both in the room with her, as were other family. There was conversation that another aunt aborted suddenly: "Hush, she's passing."

Passing.

It's not a euphemism for dying so much as an expression of the change of state.

CLH was in Europe the summer of 1989 and therefore spared the sight of our father crying when his mother died. Last week my father had driven fast up from Florida and my sister down from Boston but not I from the west so this time I was spared.

Joyce was the only one of my father's three sisters to serve as bridesmaid at my parents' wedding. She drove my mother to the hospital for my birth. She had a Christmas afternoon party every year (the one I would spend in the basement watching Planet of the Apes movies). She took care of my grandmother in her last months. She came to Uncas Lake four years ago, for the first time ever, despite growing up in that town, despite its being her children's favorite hang-out too, for my birthday party or maybe mostly to meet my mother's new husband. She was glad to see me in June, still joking despite her various pains and ailments and amputations, delighted by the story of the swan-riding cygnets. I hope she received the photographs I sent.

My father is the youngest of five siblings; the eldest is sixteen years older than he. He is the only one to have stopped smoking, 20 years ago. To those two facts I say GOOD.

Inneresting convo about the family with my sister, though. She asked if I remembered an incident with a son of the second sister. Why yes, of course I do. I tried to kick him in the nuts for how he spoke to my sister and invaded her personal space, and if I didn't connect or didn't connect hard enough that was only because we were all in a pool at the time. Turns out he pulled the same shit on other female first cousins. And people wonder why I'm not close with my extended family.

There's also that the two eldest sisters moved to the south, and I haven't been particularly diligent at attempting to overcome certain opinions about the south. Sometimes they're overturned, overcome, proved flat out wrong. Sometimes, like five minutes ago, I talk on the phone with someone from the south who won't say I talk too fast but does claim she can't hear me. Right. Me, the mouse-voiced. Just ask me to slow down, 'tay? I named her two sets of states. She was on the phone with me but still (I could tell from the period between my naming the state and her saying, "okaaaaaay") wrote out the full name of each state instead of an abbreviation. Even the AP abbrevation would have been an improvement; I do understand that someone who doesn't work with the postal ones could confuse AL (Alaska or Alabama?)

Then there's the fact that my one uncle on that side leered at me, I so swear, when I was 21 (and leerable at, lemme tell ya), and smoked in my (parents') house without asking. Or even an ashtray.

Then there's my aunt, except there isn't anymore.