"I don't want any more phone calls from Cap the day before Easter," Aunt Gret said as she came into the living room from the master bedroom. "Last year your mom and now your sister." Aunt Gret was almost smiling, but her eyes did not have their usual sparkle.
"That's right!" I laughed, half-heartedly. "How could I forget? Mom rose on Easter morning!" My brother's phone call was to report that our sister was having emergency surgery for the cyst she'd recently told me about. Fortunately, by that afternoon, she was home sleeping, and on Easter she felt better than she'd felt in months.
Aunt Gret is the younger sister of my mom, Helen. She rents a condo in Siesta Key, Florida every year in late March and April, when Ohio winters have not yet petered out. Florida isn't my idea of a destination, but then I haven't suffered through a Pennsylvania winter in over four decades, over three of which I've lived in California's Central Valley, where the sun shines nearly every day of the year. I'd go anywhere, however, to spend time with Aunt Gret. That her daughter, my cousin Ann, was also there was a bonus. Ann and her family live in Connecticut. Five years my junior, growing up we'd only seen each other at family gatherings. We connected a year ago, just days after Mom died, when she and Aunt Gret came to my son's medical school graduation in Albany, New York, and then we stayed in Ann's home. It was Ann who suggested I join her and her mom in Florida.
After my brother's phone call, Aunt Gret, Ann, and I went on about our leisurely Saturday. We breakfasted on the lanai that overlooks the pool and Siesta Key Beach, then donned bathing suits, cover-ups, and hats; lathered ourselves with sun screen; and gathered up beach chairs, towels, cameras, and reading material. Walking across the wide beach in the white quartz sand that never gets hot, it's easy to see why Siesta Key was recently dubbed America's #1 Beach. We claimed a spot and went walking through the surf, picking up small shells and looking for dolphins.
It's impossible not to have a great time when Aunt Gret is around. As she said one day while I was in Florida, "Life is for living!" She's not wild, but rather enthusiastic, embracing all that life has to offer. At eighty-three and a widow for four years and with a hip replacement, she continues to ski, golf, travel to her four children's homes, attend events of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, vacation at a lake in Michigan with friends, spend a month every year in the town in Florida she and Uncle Don adopted as their late-winter escape twenty-five years ago, and travel to California every fall to see her sister.
Aunt Gret and Mom looked like twins, despite my mom being ten years older. They loved being together. When their husbands were alive, the four of them visited each other and traveled together. We always laughed at the story of Dad telling his sister-in-law to shut up: he loved talking as much as she and was frustrated that she deprived him of center stage. But he adored her. My parents played no small part in raising mom's much younger sister and even younger brother, and Mom claimed Gret's laughter and jolliness saved Mom's hide more than once when their father was annoyed with her.
When I got the text message from my sister a year ago on Good Friday that Mom was in the ICU, my husband, Doug, and I were visiting friends at Pismo Beach. Although he'd just arrived three hours earlier after a two-day drive from Seattle, we left immediately. Nine hours later, at 4:00 A.M., we were driving around the parking lot of Palm Drive Hospital in Sebastopol, in our 1987 VW camper, looking for a spot with enough slope that we could get the van rolling then pop the clutch to start it, because our starter motor had died en route.
Mom looked at me and held her arms up from her hospital bed, and we hugged a long time. She was alert but sported a bi-flow oxygen mask that was keeping her alive, which the doctors and nurses had spent several hours accomplishing. Over the course of the day, my siblings and their spouses and our children who lived close by arrived at the hospital. The attending doctor's last words to my brother, sister, and I that evening were that Mom had about a ten-percent chance of making it through the night. Having been with her all day, the prognosis did not surprise us.
That evening, we all supped at the home overlooking the Pacific that Mom and Dad had retired to twenty-five years ago, having astutely deduced that their three children and their offspring were not going to be returning to Pennsylvania to live. Dad had embraced their new surroundings with undaunted enthusiasm, his approach to most everything in life. Mom followed his lead, as usual, and became as active as he in the church, golf association, and community. Both assumed various leadership roles, and their gregarious natures meant they were acquainted with most and dear friends of a number. Still, Mom always had a bit of reticence about the move, which passed her lips a bit more after the death of her lifemate nine years earlier. But no matter how logically her children exhorted, and even when we demanded she no longer drive, she was not leaving that house. In the end, she left the same way Dad had: in an ambulance.
I suppose it was not wanting to face the inevitable that kept everyone hanging around Mom and Dad's house Easter Sunday, until my sister and her husband finally decided to head to the hospital. Less than an hour later, the phone rang, and my sister announced, "Mom is sitting up and eating." Despite the congestive heart failure and being at death's door the night before, Mom was alert and conversant and quickly making friends with all the hospital staff. I can still feel the smile that broke my face, not only because it was Easter and Mom, as we joked, had risen, but because once again Mom had exhibited the sheer stubbornness that had kept her going so many times in her life. We had noted that her stubbornness bordered on pig-headedness at times, but there's a lot to be said for sheer will power, and none of us could say that we had not inherited the stubborn gene.
It being Easter Sunday, the hospital was minimally staffed, and only two of six ICU beds were occupied. When Mom's great-grandchildren arrived, the nurses opened the refrigerator and had them choose a juice box. Ignoring the rules, the staff allowed our family to crowd into Mom's room. When the crescendo of our talk and laughter became excessive, they simply closed the door.
My mom died peacefully a month after calling 911 herself. I was glad my older son and his wife had been out from Albany and so were able to visit with her one last time. Being with family at his graduation in Albany, just a few days after Mom died, combined with the bonus of the strong connection that my cousin Ann and I felt, gave a degree of balance to my sense that part of me had died with my mom.
During our visit at Ann's, Aunt Gret said perhaps she shouldn't come to my younger son's July wedding in California, "since I was going to stay with Helen." I told her she must still come, unable to imagine not sharing this event, as we had so many others, with Aunt Gret. My siblings and I quickly reorganized her trip and lodging. At the wedding reception, one of my nephew's shot a wonderful video of Aunt Gret dancing to techno music with the bride and groom. He comments, "All right, Gret! Woo!" See what I mean? Aunt Gret is vital. The day after the wedding, we had an informal family memorial for Mom. Then Doug and I brought Aunt Gret home with us for a two-day tour of our area and the national parks in our backyard.
On Ann's and my last night in Florida, we drove down Siesta Key, lamenting the McMansions that have replaced so many fishing cottages on both the gulf and intracoastal sides of the narrow island. We ate seafood on the deck of Turtle's, overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway. There was activity in the huge osprey nest built on top of a pole at the neighboring marina. A couple of boats puttered in, and a fishing kayak was moored a few hundred yards out.
After dinner, we crossed the road to Turtle Beach to watch the sunset, as we had every night, and look for sand dollars. While looking for seashells on our first beach walk, I'd told Aunt Gret how much Doug likes sand dollars, and she was determined to find him one from Florida. The steep beach and pea-gravel-like sand contrasted sharply with the flatness and white quartz of Crescent Beach outside Aunt Gret's condo. Several children still played in the water, while the adults kept one eye on them and one on the setting sun.
"Everyone gathers like this for sundown in Michigan, too, but the sunset is nothing like here," Aunt Gret commented. Aunt Gret loves the sunset, as my dad did, so it makes sense that she would differentiate between "sundown" and "sunset," something I'd never heard before.
"It's a good puddle tonight," said Ann. A sun "puddle" was another term that was new to me. That night I could see it clearly: a red puddle spread out on the water beneath the sun.
"Maybe tonight we'll see a green flash," Aunt Gret said, and we had yet another family discussion of exactly what a green flash is. "Is there really such a thing? I never saw one in Bodega, but your dad had that list of everyone who did." I had found Dad's list in Mom's dresser, when we were cleaning out their house. It's labeled "Green Flash Believers: This certifies that I witnessed a green flash of the setting sun of our solar system on this date at Bodega Bay, California," and is signed and dated by sixteen family members and friends.
Then, just after the ocean rolled over the sun, Ann and I both saw a green-blue puddle on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Aunt Gret missed it, but I think that is at least in part her eyesight, which of course she never ever complains about. It seems perhaps the "flash" refers not to the shape, as we all thought, but the length of the phenomenon. I'm so glad I saw it, because Aunt Gret so fervently wanted for us to see it.
Walking back up the beach I spotted a small spiral shell, picked it up, and called, "Look, Aunt Gret! I found one!" She had just mentioned the existence of such shells before we stopped our shell hunting for the sunset. I felt like a child who needs her mother badly, and I didn't care that the top of the shell was broken off.
Shortly before my mom's death, the matriarch of Aunt Gret's inlaws also died. When her sister Helen died, Aunt Gret announced, "I don't think I'm ready to be the matriarch of both families!" Of course, she's taken what life has dealt her in graceful stride.
"You're coming to California this fall as usual, aren't you, Aunt Gret?" I asked over breakfast on my last day at Siesta Key. We had just dropped Ann off at the airport, and I still had a couple of hours before my flight.
My heart dipped as she hesitated briefly, but then I heard the words I wanted to hear: "Well, sure—let me look at my calendar when I get home to Ohio."
"We'll pick you up at whatever airport is best for you to fly into and make sure you see everyone," I told her.
Even as I'm writing this, my eyes are tearing up again at the thought of my next visit with my Aunt Gret.
