My Aunt's Legacy

Dear You,

Because she created such an imagined life, my aunt now finds herself in an awful fix. For over a half-century, Aunt G arranged everything as though she had been born into privilege. With a husband who did her bidding and worked sometimes three jobs to provide, she made her house secure, her acquaintances limited, and her outlook narrow. Now she is old and mostly friendless, and she is terrified.

I do not diminish her gifts, nor do I love her less for knowing all this. I have some sense of what it took her to move from a deprived childhood -- father dead when she was a teenager, the Depression making the family hungry and without a home, and who knows what else? I know she has always been intelligent. She has always been generous and loving to me. But on one enormous truth she was blind.

It matters little what you have -- possessions, money, clothes, address -- if you do not weave a tapestry of relationships while you can, before you grow cold with age and need the comfort only that can provide. What friends she had are dead or dying. Many in the family now keep their distance, and those who remain cannot possibly provide all that she requires.

On the occasions when I can visit I come away with great sadness.