Generations

 My Aunt Sadie passed away last evening.  I know I should say our Aunt Sadie; she was first of all Barbara's mother and Nancy's mother...I should say that, too.  If you will forgive me, though, this remembrance is about what her life and passing has meant to me.

Yesterday, I spoke a few words to her over the phone, and heard the sound of her voice...harsh, short sounds...if she intended words, they were indistinct.  After all, she was hard at work trying to die.  A few weeks ago, she and I talked:  she'd gotten a cough and her chest hurt...likely, she said, it was pollen, especially thick in her area (as in ours) this year.

Another phone call:  she'd been to the doctor, and was given more medicine to take.  "I don't think I should take any more medicine," she told me firmly.  "I'm ready to go." 

 Something she had said to me times before.  She was 100 years and 8 months old, after all.

Did I respond the right way?  I don't remember.  I hope I was sympathetic, not dismissive (even if fondly dismissive).  I hope I said,  "I know."

Anyway, it turned out her symptoms were more complicated than that.  Her heart was failing, she whose heart was as wide open as the ocean, which she loved.

  It took her a long time to finally leave us...over a week, while she was so intensely  willing herself to go. 

"Those sisters!"  My sister Ann said.  "Their bodies are so strong."  She was thinking of my mother, Gilda, the first of the three to go...healthy for 93 years, until she lay two weeks in hospice after strokes, unable to talk or to take sustenance, listening to us sing, talk, pray our way around her.  (What could she have been thinking the meanwhile?)

And their middle sister, Vi, who fell one day here, and, though at 98 she'd been living with heart diseases and blindness, finally succumbed...weeks later, fighting death all the way.

Strong, yes.  Loving, yes, each in her way, all through our lives.  Resilience born of strength and care (care of all kinds).

Now they are all gone, that whole generation.  

While Aunt Sadie was with us, we could still be the younger ones we'd always been.  Now, what?

Here comes the selfish part of this reflection:   even while the sorrow of my aunt's death washes over me, I think to myself:  

I am the eldest of the young...or was.  Now I'm just the elder.

And I wonder:  have they managed, in their passing, to pass to me that strength, that care, that resilience that keeps going?  (All those years, I could be so resistent!) Can I even in a small part, live up to what they were?  Can I?