WeePlanet

Back in October I used the bully pulpit of this blog to take my Aunt Alice to task for her excesses. I haven’t written about her since, but if I had it would have been to report some small success in convincing her to stop her crazy experiment in empathy for our son Javid.

But my aunt, like so many of my relatives, is not a reasonable person. It is, finally, what makes them such a mix of the endearing, utterly maddening, and finally quite remarkable.

Here, then, are just a few of the remarkable qualities of my unreasonable Aunt Alice:

1. She shoe-horned her way into college and later a master’s degree, despite being the oldest child of conservative Mennonite farmers with no particular understanding of what a girl child would ever do with so much education.
2. She older-sistered six rapscallion little sibs without, as far as I can tell, even once sitting on their chests and taunting them as she tweaked their noses. Which considering how well my baby brother turned out, means she did a bang-up job–especially when factoring in that my mother was one of the rapscallia.
3. She found and loved my Uncle Claude, despite his abiding passion for developing such immodest projects as the single most cost-effective anti-poverty effort in the history of the planet.
4. In a priceless boon to the diversity of our extended family, she raised up five great children with such marvelously varying worldviews as might be accomplished by hanging a list of targets on a wall, then handing a fistful of darts to a blindfolded man with vertigo.
5. She learned three languages, including one that had no modern written alphabet until she and my uncle moved to a remote area of southern Mexico to create it. Really.
6. She misplaced more things and butted into more conversations than any other 10 people … excepting perhaps her siblings. We were all amused but not surprised to hear, just days after Alice was put on a ventilator last fall because of her pulmonary fibrosis, that she had groggily tried to interject a comment into a conversation between my cousin and a nurse by writing letters in the air.

Aunt Alice died yesterday morning. Some measure of warmth and of remarkableness has gone out of the world.

Being left with an unquenched thirst for what is lost is one of those hurts that I learned to value in the death of our son Javid. My unreasonable Aunt Alice lived eventfully for many years, which don’t seem to me diminished by wishing she could be around for more.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 8:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.