There was a death in my family this week.
My Great Aunt, my Grandmother's sister, died Tuesday of pancreatic cancer. It was all very fast - we'd just gotten the diagnosis a few weeks ago, and there was, apparently, little to be done.
my Aunt was an amazing, wonderful woman. She was very accepting of my Mom and Dad - a black man and a white woman, together, in the fifties - from the beginning; my father, her nephew, lived with her while he went to college, where he met my mom. Bettie was my god mother, and my earliest babysitter, and she delighted in telling stories about me as a small, precocious child. She was also always, always, there for me... until she couldn't be.
When I started this blog, I was living in her house in Boston, and she was succumbing to dementia, more than we realized at the time. By the time I left, she was having trouble recognizing familiar people, or distinguishing between real and factional details - she became fearful of crime she saw in dramas on television, just as one example. Losing her that way was slow and painful, and ultimately, other relatives had to assume responsibility for her. After I left, she moved into a nursing home, and she had only been there for some months before the cancer diagnosis.
Losing Bettie has been more profound than I would have imagined. My mother is devastated, and I find myself sometimes too sad to breathe. I'm not a big believer in wallowing in grief - it's the New England stoic in me - and sad events usually sideswipe me with the intensity of emotion. I've never loved our cultural fascination with death and dying; I'd prefer if we were practical, and dealt with loss in a practical way. And yet... here I am, terribly sad, and unable to do more than write this.
The funeral is Friday, and Mom and I will be in transit for much of the time, so probably little blogging for a while.
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