I was heading off to bed last night, obeying our new 11:00 curfew, when the phone rang. My mom called me back down. Aunt Rose had died just a few hours before. My cousins, her kids, found her and panicked, calling the paramedics, but it was too late.
Mom didn't know what to do. Dad had already gone to bed for the night; should she wake him up? Let him go to work and at least get a few hours in before she woke up the next morning and called him? Leave a note for him to wake her up before he left?
More than anything else I'm worried for my dad. The memorial service for one of his close friends, who died in his sleep of a heart attack while we were on vacation, was on Saturday, just the day before.
It's just not fair.
God, if something happens to Grandma after all this... He says when he called Grandma today, she said she'd thought something like this was going to happen soon. Aunt Rose seemed different, happier, as if she knew the end was coming...
A couple years ago for Christmas I sent out emails to all his relatives I could get hold of. I wanted to make him a photo album of all of them, since we live all over the place and most of them we don't get to see often, and asked for their favorite pictures and for letters about their favorite memories with him to include in the album. There were photos of people he hadn't seen in years, some of them dead, photos of him and his siblings when they were every age from toddlers to teenagers. He told me he cried after reading it.
Her letter was one of the longest. There was the time they'd all been playing football. Apparently she was going through pair after pair of glasses at the time because they kept breaking in accidents, so she'd taken them off beforehand and left them on the porch railing. But my dad said, "No! Don't leave them up there, they'll get broken again. Here, I'll put them in my shirt pocket."
Brilliant idea, huh? The first tackle, and crack went her glasses.
And there was the time he'd bustled her into the car and taken her on a secret trip, just the two of them. He was the oldest, I think ten years or so older than her, who was the youngest of four boys and two girls, and she was awed that he'd taken the time to hang out with his kid sister. He took her out to a movie, I think it was The Rescuers? And she was so excited.
She was sick. She had had MS for as long as I could remember - Dad says only three or four years, but I don't know if I'd ever even met her before that. It has no cure, and she had a particularly virulent and quick strain of it. She moved like someone half-asleep, her voice when she called us on the phone as often as not slurred into a mind-numbing monotone by tiredness and constant medication. Her swollen legs and feet dangled uselessly from her wheelchair, numb except for the shooting agony that came at the slightest contact.
I remember driving down with my dad to help her, their brother Mike, and my cousins move her stuff out of the trailer home she'd lived in into a spacious new apartment. She seemed great aside from the obvious wheelchair - right up until the point she became totally still, her eyes rolled up, and she started shaking violently in the throes of a seizure. It terrified me, helplessly watching around the corner as my dad and Uncle Mike quickly got her out of the wheelchair onto the floor before she could hurt herself.
I remember visiting her in the hospital with Grandma. I think she might've had another seizure while we were there, or been close to it.
I remember another time visiting her at her house. She was going to teach me to crochet but we kept getting distracted. A few months later she sent me and my sister a big box full of yarn and needles and an instruction booklet. The box had comically misspelled words on it reminiscent of Uncle Rob, who'll send us stuff calling us the wrong names and signed, "Uncle Buck."
She wanted to write a romantic novel. On one of our long phone conversations she took me through the entire book's plot; it was something about a woman with two kids who's writing a story for them, and somehow this man becomes involved. She hates him at first because her husband just died, but then they fall in love.
In the meantime she wrote poetry. Some of it was about everyday stuff, but there were also poems about her illness. About MS taking her body away from her, about her body falling apart while she could do nothing. It was the kind of poetry that people in the Writer's Forum would flame with scathing comments about how there was no real meter, how rhyming doesn't make prose into poems, about the lack of figurative language. But the feelings behind it were real enough. She'd email them to me, and I'd try to change the subject before she asked me what I thought. She'd ask me to ask my dad to read the MS poems first and make sure they were okay for me to read because they could get graphic, and he'd be annoyed at being pestered.
I dreaded getting phone calls from her because we'd be on the phone for hours before I could extricate myself, because I couldn't help trying to be a good listener and encouraging her to continue and she never ran out of stuff to talk about. My sister and I would go invisible on AIM if she was signed on, but sometimes she'd catch me before I noticed and we'd be talking for a while. I'd have to change my font to something huge and dark so she could read it.
We visited my grandparents about a month ago, just me and my dad while my sister and mom were in Florida for Nationals, and I heard there was almost a fight because at the last minute Dad found out Aunt Rose would be there and considered calling the trip off, and Grandma told her. I don't know the details, or even if the parts I know are correct; I heard it secondhand from my sister who'd heard them talking. But we went anyway. She was over there a lot, and my parents didn't like how she was making her mother, who's got enough health problems herself as it is, take care of her so much. I was struck by how much she seemed to be gone already, moving slower than a sleepwalker, head tilted listlessly to one side. We went swimming together - or, I went swimming and she sat in her bathing suit on the steps in the pool because her paralyzed legs would never have let her do more. She brought out her CD player and played some music for us; some classic rock I actually recognized, some Bon Jovi because one of my friends loves his music, other stuff I didn't know, and gave me copies of all of them before we left. I still haven't listened to them yet. And she smoked all the time while we were outside. I tried not to breathe or to think about the number of toxic chemicals in secondhand smoke, but she must've noticed my discomfort because she asked if I wanted her to stop. I said something to that effect, but the wind changed and she apparently figured that would be good enough because she continued. I tried not to let my parents find out because I knew they'd be mad.
She didn't care about the smoke being even worse for her health. By then her immune system was so shot, partly because of the drugs and partly despite them, that she had to wear one of those masks if she went out in public. She said her doctor had admitted that she had so few vices left that she might as well just keep smoking or she'd go nuts with it. She was out there to get a deep tan, and I was surprised because my mom's always cautioning us to put on lots of sunscreen and not get too exposed because of skin cancer. But I guess she knew that she wasn't going to live long enough to worry about that. Or worry about inheriting her mother's macular degeneration, which is what made Grandma finally stop smoking because she was going blind so much faster.
She told me about RJ, my cousin, and his fiancee. He's just a few years older than me, 19 maybe, and they were planning to get married. The girl was already having her young son call him Dad. But stuff happened, and it got called off. They broke up for a while, but now they're dating again. I think Aunt Rose was a bit relieved they weren't rushing into it, even though she liked her.
I didn't know her. I never really got the chance, or maybe I didn't give myself the chance, didn't want to go to the effort of digging past the medication and the pain to find my dad's kid sister somewhere in there.
She had a cat named Claws. She loved her two sons dearly, but Grandma and everyone else said they were like brats to her sometimes.
I can't believe she's dead.
I don't know what to feel...
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