Requiescat in Pace

My Great Aunt Kathryn went to be with Jesus this weekend, on Valentine's Day. I know she must be happier beyond even her own imagining, first to be face to face with her Lord, but also to get to sit beside her sister, my grandmother, as she is doing here. Gramma is on the left, in the picture, Auntie Kay on the right with what looks like the crossword from the paper. They are sitting in the old Corbett house, in Portland, some afternoon. Maybe younger grandchildren were sliding down the stairs and careening around, but think this must have been taken when I was slightly older. I, and other cousins, would come in and try to warm up by standing over the heaters, or complain and boss. I don't really know. That fog of adolescent angst obscures my backwards view. I can remember the house, the carefully placing by grandpa of his pen on the one shelf of sanity allotted to him, the piles of clutter and the homey feeling, but nothing that was said or done, only the tidal waves of hormones and frustration that overwhelmed me at that age. I wasn't the only one. The Lander way is to take up a book and retreat, and there couldn't have been a more perfect house for that way.

But that was Portland. Auntie Kay and Uncle Sant lived in Annandale New Jersey, the usual and necessary stop when flying back and forth between Portland to Mali, through Newark or JFK. We always had a few days with her, whichever direction we were going. And then it turned out to be a real providence because I went to school on the east coast, like a fool and a knave, and am still here, fifteen or whatever years later. Auntie Kay took me up to Cornell at least twice. And then Gramma and Grandpa made one last trip out east to see the old family house before it was sold, and all the Pennsylvania and New Jersy relatives. When the festivaties were all over Gramma and Auntie Kay took me back to school and toiled up the dark dangerous stairs to see my wretched apartment and weird cat that had adopted me. That same trip the two of them hauled me off to the midnight Christmas Eve service at some random episcopal church, even though it was horribly uncomfortable and unpleasant for them. Was it that time that my cousin and I were taken in hand and definitly taught to knit? Maybe another visit. For years after I kept on, obediently making scarves, and finally a blanket.

And it was to Auntie Kay's house that I went during a short holiday the first year of Seminary. And for some reason, which I can't remember now, Matt followed me up, and, for reasons and timing neither of us can really understand, asked me to marry him in her front room. I mean, it's not like he followed me up with a ring. He just knew I was there and came to see me, and then we were chatting, and it just so happened that he asked, sort of accidental like, and I happened to say yes. And we didn't tell anybody, or speak of it again ourselves, but Auntie Kay got on the phone to West Africa, scaring everyone because you don't just call, unless something bad has happened, and said to my mother, “I really like him”.

“Who!?” cried my mother, “who do you like?!”

She drug Uncle Sant back out to Portland for the wedding, even though he kept insisting he was too old, and that this was past the Last Time. He wasn't going to have to travel any more.

When we moved to Binghamton she made a regular habit of coming up here and buying us the whole contents of Wegmans. She would plan so she that could go to church, to the women's bible study, and Christian Ed. We would make a big fancy dinner and she would hold whichever one was a baby at the time.

I could ramble on and on, winding my way through the maze of years and years the way you do when, well, you're related to someone, and they have a habit of going way out of their way to see you and make life easier. And so they become a center point, a fixed mark on your horizon. Every individual grief is really the same grief. When Gramma played her last chord on the piano, and bowed her head, so suddenly, and went away from this world to the next one, I think many of us Landers felt the universe shift and quake. Auntie Kay has made living on this side of the country reasonable, you know, because there's family here. All the griefs of all the losses are caught up for me this morning, in losing her.

And now I will go into Sheol and fold laundry for the rest of the day, because I just don't know how to go on.