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This is the last trip I will make for Aunt Bev. I knew Uncle Jessie was ill, so we were able to go see him when he was still able to visit for a few hours. It was a good visit. For my aunt the first that most of us knew she was ill was that she was in the hospital getting, last I was told, a quadruple bypass. She never recovered from it. So the last thing I can do for her, is go today, with my family, and pay our respects. It’s a three and a half hour drive one way, but that’s close enough. We’ll drive down, do the viewing, and drive back. Truthfully, the trip, like the funeral, is for the ones she left behind. My Uncle Toots had been married to her for nearly fifty years; forty-eight or forty-nine. Another uncle and aunt were unable to agree on which, and since that was before I was born, I couldn’t break the tie. I was not going to call up Uncle Toots and say, which year were you married? Not a question for now. But whichever year it was, that is a long time to be married. I can’t really imagine one of them without the other. I’m sure my bewilderment is nothing compared to my uncle’s, or their two children, and their grandchildren. I know what it’s like to loose a mother, I’ve done it twice, so I understand some of the grief, but not all. Grief is too personal, too intimate a pain.
Aunt Bev was one of the few other people in my blood family that read. She didn’t read the same kind of books I did, but she read. The summer that I stayed at their house, she took me to the library a lot. She, like all of my family, never argued with my choices in books. No matter how odd. She was kind, and she was smart, and I didn’t really know her. She was Aunt Bev, and I spent more time with her when I was a child than I did as an adult. You grow up, you get a life of your own. Aunt Bev and Uncle Toots lived in a different state from the rest of the family, so when we visited Granny, they weren’t Johnny on the spot. So there are other relatives that I saw more often. But Uncle Toots and Aunt Bev took me on their family vacation one year. Their kids, Denise and Bret, were a year and two years older than me, respectively. So my aunt and uncle went on a car vacation to the east coast with three teenagers in the car. This was in the days before portable video players, or iPods. Bret did have a tape player with something either headphones or an ear piece. I read. But, at some point they started threatening to throw my book out the window. I’m sure I did more accidental irritating things to them. Three teenagers in a car without any portable electronic amusements; not a peaceful way to travel. We had a good time, all in all, but I’m sure we drove my aunt and uncle a little crazy. We went to one of the Carolinas, I honestly can’t remember which one. I saw the sea for the first time. It was leaden and gray, and cold. I remember being disappointed. But I appreciated the trip, because it was the only trip I ever went on that wasn’t to see relatives. It was the only trip I was ever on, until college, that was just to see somewhere new. They had neighbors that had moved there, and they were visiting them, but it was a vacation, not a pilgrimage on the altar of family obligation. It was new places, and new sights, and things we’d never done before.
Now, one last trip to see Aunt Bev, though, of course, we aren’t seeing her. She’s not there anymore. I told Jon that I’d like to visit some people before they go in a box. I think I’ll make that part of the new year’s resolutions. But this one, I’m hoping to keep.