Loss, and love

One after the other, my aunt’s husband of fifty-nine years and her three grown children spoke — about what they remembered, what they would miss.  It was bitterly cold in Florida on Saturday, all rain and bluster. My dad had gone to the house early, to staple plastic sheeting around the screened lanai and install a rented space heater to keep the guests warm.  “I want music,” my aunt had told my mother some months ago, and so my mom found a singer, and we had “Amazing Grace.”  Also at my aunt’s request, the portrait she had painted of her beloved dog Mokie hung in a place of honor on the kitchen wall.  There was a reading from the Bible, the 23rd psalm; she had wanted that, too.

Otherwise, for the first time in their lives, her family was on its own.  Together, without the guiding hand of the one who really ought to have been right there calling the shots, my mom and my uncle and cousins created a service that felt fitting and true. This is what we do, when the loved ones in our life pass on. We attend to details, send cards and flowers, change plans, book plane tickets. We cook and rent chairs and search for old photos and call the caterer.  We get busy, and then we gather ourselves together and try to make some sense of it all. My mother had baked a cheesecake, found a poem, arranged for a meal, asked my son Henry to compile two cds worth of music.  And when it was her turn, she stood up in the living room and tried to put into words how it felt to lose the last person on the planet whom she’d known and loved all her life, her big sister.

My uncle wrote a eulogy, and then somehow found the strength to read it. He recalled the day he saw my aunt for the first time, in the lunch line at the University of New Hampshire in the fall of 1948.  She was blonde, movie-star beautiful, voted Kampus Kitten that freshman year.  “I’m going to marry that girl,” my uncle told his buddy. He did, and until the day she died, he marveled at the way her smile still lit up the room. “She was the nicest person I ever knew,” he said at the end, his eyes full of tears, and then he said it again, to make sure we all knew how important that was to him.

“My mom was always there, every time I woke up after one of my surgeries,” recalled my cousin Carol, who lost a leg to cancer at age eleven and has endured countless surgeries in the forty-plus years since.  “Sitting by my bed, just waiting with me.”

My cousin Sue described a hot summer day, a ride on the swan boats in the Public Garden in Boston with her two young sons and her mom.  Nothing special really, except that those boys are grown now and launched on lives of their own. But years ago they had experienced a moment together, and they had each cherished the memory ever since.  Behind Sue, on the bookshelf, stood a blurry photograph–two sweaty little boys on a boat, a weary young mother, a grandmother whose face was alight with joy.  “Every spring, when the swan boats return,” Sue promised us, and herself, “I’m going to make sure to go again, and to remember the happiness of that day.”

“We had an ongoing, private conversation,” my cousin Don revealed, when it was his turn. “My mom and I could talk about anything, but we shared a curiosity about spiritual things, mysteries, the afterlife. . . We always wondered about what would come next.  I have a feeling my mom knows the answer now.”

My aunt was an artist, and her watercolors fill the walls of her modest home. Months ago, she affixed small stickers to the frames, ensuring that each child and grandchild would receive their rightful inheritances.  She had brought her two girls together (“We were always ‘the girls,’ Sue pointed out, “no matter how old we got.”), and insisted that they divvy up her jewelry–the nearly sixty years worth of anniversary gifts, the Christmas pins bestowed by a steady stream of long-ago fifth-grade students, the cache of tiny plastic pickle pins, the final remains of my grandfather’s career as a traveling salesman for Heinz.

But I have been thinking, these last two days, of my aunt’s real legacy. Of what it is that any of us leave behind us when we go.  The “stuff” doesn’t really mean much.  Most us yearn for less of it in our homes, in our lives.  What counts, in the end, is love.  My uncle’s recollections to the contrary, my aunt was not a perfect wife and mother.  Their family life wasn’t perfect either. Whose is?  Yet I found deep consolation in the course of that cold, rainy hour, as my Aunt Gloria’s husband and children offered their memories. What had endured for them, what they shared with the rest of us, was the knowledge that they had been loved — loved unconditionally and completely — for who they are.

I have been worried about a son this week.  Giving in to fear, I lost my way, wrote an email I regretted almost instantly, spun hurt and anger when I should have been re-stitching a sturdy seam of love.  We are working to set things right, my son and I, to reweave what has been torn between us.  I feel some urgency about that, feel committed to speaking with more care in the future, to having more faith that things are already as they are meant to be. Death is, among other things, a pretty stark reminder to the living of what really matters in the grand scheme of things.  It’s not the book written, the picture painted, the money earned, saved, or spent. It’s certainly not being right, or convincing another to see your point of view.  And so, I realized this morning that I owed my son an apology. “I’m sorry” doesn’t fix a problem, but it does bring love back into the heart and center of things.  This is, I think, the only legacy worth leaving: the knowledge that no matter how many other things we’ve done or not done along the way, we have loved our loved ones with all our hearts, as best we can, from one moment to the next.