My Aunt Irene
I recently lost my Aunt Irene. The funeral was on the 12th
of May. Since she lived in Indianapolis, they provided a service for her there
on the 10th, before shipping her down to Kentucky and her old
hometown. She had been recovering from gall bladder surgery and was in a
nursing home, thinking she would be going home soon, but while taking a shower,
she took a fall, and death occurred. This was on the 8th of May.
I had lost my sister ten days earlier; and though I loved my
aunt, the death of my sister drained most of my tears reserved in my reservoir, leaving it nearly bone-dry;
also, I would rather think of the good times about them both than dwell upon
the sad.
This is in honor of my aunt; I have another essay coming in
honor of my sister. I feel they both deserve their own piece about what they
meant to me, and I will share some of my memories. But I felt I must mention
the fact they walked on within a very short time of each other, and I feel that
had my sister still been here, alive, there would have been plenty of tears for
my aunt. But I know she knows I loved her; it is not all about tears that says
how deep love can be.
What was Aunt Irene like?
To know my aunt was to know a fun-loving spirit. In the
words of her husband, Uncle TJ Harville, “She loved life and knew how to live
it to the fullest.”
I asked Uncle TJ as we stood beside the coffin with Aunt
Irene sleeping beside us, “How did you meet?”
He said, “Oh, it wasn’t easy. Her parents didn’t think she
should marry. I had to convince them, and she did too.” They celebrated 50
years of marriage, in 2010. They were a devoted couple.
He kept saying, “I thought I would go first.” He was four
years older than she.
He also said, “I don’t know what I will do without her. I
miss her so much. I think it won’t be long for me.” But he also said, “We don’t
know when or how we will go. I sure thought it would be me.”
My aunt was all of four foot and five, maybe six inches
tall. But for all her short stature she sure had a lot of spunk. That lady
could outdo me in energy when I was eleven. She could go and go; especially if
it was something she considered fun.
She loved places like Goodwill’s stores and Salvation Army
stores as well as yard sales. She loved to buy what she considered ‘bargains’;
but her purchases weren’t always the wisest. I remember when my family lived in
Indianapolis, one street over from my aunt and uncle’s place, and we would go
‘Goodwilling’ we would hit the big stores, and as you would go in, they would
have these big bags, labeled ‘grab-bags’; you couldn’t see what was in them,
and it could be anything. My aunt loved the surprise of what might be inside;
and rare was the time she would leave without sinking some money into a couple
of these ‘mystery bags’; well, I remember that after three or four times of
finding out the contents of those bags, how I, at 10 or 11 years old, lost my
zeal for them; but not Aunt Irene. It was like she kept hoping there would be
something wonderful in them, instead of hundreds of mismatched socks which had
not a single pair you could mate in the whole lot.
My mother would advise her, “Don’t waste your money on them,
Irene. They fill them with things they can’t put on the shelf; it is all about
a profit.” But she never listened; Aunt Irene was head-strong; she always got her
way, and for some reason she believed that every bag had to hold something
wonderful.
I think it was the thrill of the surprise in store for her
that spurred her on; whatever disappointment she had last time didn’t matter;
this time it was going to be great.
Her enthusiasm was contagious. She would sweep in with cheer
and be gone in minutes, but leave behind people who were either very happy or
totally pissed off; maybe the pissed off ones were jealous that she could
breeze around so gaily and not see how miserable life could be sometimes.
She knew I was an artist, and long about the time I was
nineteen and going to college, in my first semester, she came to visit. We
lived a block from a small corner store, and she was saying how she wanted to
make up for missing Christmas with us. She would get us whatever we wanted.
Mama and Aunt Irene went to that store, since it was close
by. They brought back some food to eat, as well as things she said were gifts
for us. I don’t remember what she gave the others, but I know she handed me a
bag and said, “Here’s Christmas, Sissy.” She called Mama, and Aunt Athlene as
well as me ‘Sissy’; everybody was her sister even if they weren’t. “I got you
art supplies.” She beamed a grin so huge it was blinding.
The package had crayons and a coloring book in it. “We can
color together, Sweety.” She giggled. She rushed off to do something else, and
I said, “Art supplies are a sketchbook and coloring pencils, Aunt Irene.” My
mother gave me a disapproving frown.
I thought how that would have been great about seven years
earlier, but not to the college kid I was right then.
But to Aunt Irene, coloring in coloring books was a great
art project. She loved putting puzzles together too. She was a big kid who
never grew up, even though she got married and aged with the passing years.
That was why her folks had been hesitant to let her marry
Uncle TJ. They knew she was mentally on the young side and only when they knew
she would be better off having a husband take care of her rather than being
shunted back and forth between family members who would keep her until she did
something that grated their nerves and they would ship her off to the next
family to keep her a few months, did they agree to let her marry.
She was married in 1960; prior to that, she spent several
short stays with her brother ‘Uchee’ and his wife ‘Sylvie’ aka Utah and Sylvia,
my parents. I was born in 1958. And before she married in 1960, I have several
memories of Aunt Irene staying with us.
My first memory that included her was when we lived on
Morris Street.
For years, whenever I heard Morris Street mentioned it
sounded like they were saying Mars Street; until one day we passed by and they
pointed at the place where we lived when I was a baby. Able to read, I said,
“That says Morris Street.” I was informed, “Yes, that’s Mars Street.” I
concluded it was the same word, it was just that its Kentucky drawl sounded
different than its spelling; I also remember when my Uncle Ricky was married the first time, his wife’s name
went from ‘Rita’ to ‘Reeder’ when spoken by Granny Law, her mother-in-law.
Since I had taken a speech class in first grade to learn how to pronounce my
letters more clearly, I had become more conscious in the benefit of good
pronunciation and took some pride in not telling people my name was ‘Jewwiann
Waw’. I still to this day sometimes have to spell my name to keep from being
called such things as Jo Lynn or Mary Anne, but how people get that out of
Jerriann, I think the problem lies in them, not me. Aunt Irene mostly called me
Jerri, if she wasn’t saying Sissy. I didn’t mind, too much, although only
people very close to me got that privilege; I prefer the whole ‘Jerriann.’
There was a day that Mama took Holly and me, as well as Aunt
Irene downtown. We lived a few blocks away, and it was a nice day for a walk. I
was in the stroller, it was one of the fifties style, metal, and a dark blue.
We had to cross back and forth over the railroad crossing. It was on the way
back that something happened that jogged this memory into the groove so that I
retain it to this day. It wasn’t my very first memory, but it is one of my
earliest and I was only a few months old. I’m not sure if this was before or
after my first year birthday, but it was around that time. We didn’t live on
Morris Street for very long. I think we moved to Henderson in early 1959, but
whether it was before my birthday in March, I can’t say.
We started to cross the tracks just up from the street we
lived on. Since there was more than me
in that stroller; it held whatever Mama had bought downtown, too; it was pretty
heavy. A wheel got stuck in the tracks. Mama was trying her best to get the
stroller lose, jerking back and forth, and then Aunt Irene starting jumping up
and down, as she held my sister’s hand, yelling, “Train, the train is coming.”
Well, I saw this creature; and it was scary. Big and black, one-eyed and
screaming like a black cat, a very angry one; and I started crying, squalling.
Mama wouldn’t grab me and go, she wanted that stroller and
me off the tracks; maybe a dumb thing to do, but in that instance she succeeded.
Just at the last second, she got it loose, as well as me, in it; and we all
rushed to the safety of the other side; none worse for wear, except that it
scared me so bad, I couldn’t stop crying. I kept seeing that ‘big black panther,’
just like what Mama kept on the coffee table, only so much more gigantic. I
knew, even as that squalling baby, it just about chewed us up for lunch. I had
flashbacks for days after that; nightmares, and then gradually, it just phased
into a memory as other life experiences came along.
Well, my Dad worked as a lineman, and he had been spending
weeks at a time away from home, leaving Mama to fend for herself with two
little girls; that was why she welcomed Irene to come stay with us; it would
help free her up from constant baby watching while she did her chores, plus
Irene could help with that some too. And they did give her some pocket money.
When we moved to Mrs. Melton’s apartment on Main Street in
Henderson, at first Irene wasn’t there, but after awhile, she begged them into
allowing her to come stay; she got tired of being at her parents’ house and
wanted a change of scenery.
Mama welcomed her there, even though it meant another mouth
to feed, but since she could get Irene to help her with us, and maybe ease her
burden, she was fine with it, and as long as Irene behaved and minded her and Daddy,
then it was okay for her to be there.
She would come for a few weeks; and at first it would be
pretty good, but then Irene would start acting up, doing mischievous things that upset Mama and finally
Daddy would agree, she had wore out her welcome, and back home she would go.
Irene would kiss old guys on the street for a nickel or
dime; they thought it was funny to see her pucker for a kiss; when Holly told
Mama what Irene was doing, Mama would steam and tell Daddy who laughed like it
was the funniest thing, but Mama said ‘no good would come of it.’ She told
Irene she ‘better stop it or one of them would ask her for more than a kiss one
day and did she want to end up in a ditch, dead, for stupidity?’
She had some friends; one was a young fella, Billy Joe, who
had gotten sent to reform school, and she had the hots for him. Her running
around in his company was very much against my Mama’s wishes. Irene got to
slipping off to be with him, and
sometimes, she would leave five year old Holly to tend after me, when
Mama had left us in the care of Irene, who was around 22 or 23 at the time, but
acted more like a ten or twelve year old. The young guy was the son of the lady
who lived in the other apartment, her name was Rosie, and I loved Rosie. ‘Billy
Joe, though, was a punk’, Mama said, ‘and he would hurt Irene.’ She didn’t
trust him.
One evening, a cop arrested Billy Joe on the sidewalk out
front. We saw it from the window. Irene started freaking and Mama had to grab
her and clamp her hand over her mouth; she wanted to run down there and stop
that cop, but instead she got a resounding face slap from Mama who told her she
was an ‘utter fool.’ I never saw Billy Joe again; he must have done a more
serious deed that jailed him.
After that, Irene went back home, but she came back a few
months later.
A few other things, I remember. One was when Irene would
talk Holly into playing a game called ‘Jail’ and that required us as the
prisoners and she was the guard. The bars were the rails on the end of our
parents’ footboard. They had a metal bed. We would press our faces against the
bars and she would feed us bread and a cup of water. Or deny it if we were
‘bad’; one time, playing this game, I pushed forward and got my head stuck in
between two of the rails, and by the time I was released, it felt like my ears
were half torn away from all the tugging Irene had attempted, before Mama came
in to find out why I was crying so much.
Irene was forbidden to play that game with us anymore. She
did like to do dress-up, and I think she is the one got Holly into liking to
play dress-up games; I remember one day when I was four I finally told my
sister ‘no’ for the first time ever. I will go into that memory in Holly’s
story, so I’ll hold that thought.
Irene would get in a ‘house cleaning’ mood, which mainly
involved the kitchen cabinets. And this would be when Mama was busy elsewhere;
so it was this big thing to Holly and me, how Mama was in for a big surprise.
True, but not a pleasant one, because Irene did this same thing more than once,
and every time she would lose steam, lose interest and go running off with her
friends, for just a minute, she would tell Holly; Mama would get back find us
alone; a bad thing; but the messed up kitchen would really blow her top. She
would be ready to chew Irene up and spit her out; she was that angry.
Repentant, Irene would swear never again to leave ‘the girls’
alone or make a mess and leave it before it was finished up. Promises she
couldn’t keep and Mama knew it, but she had to accept it anyway.
And there was the day it finally stuck in my head that
people could lie and that I could be blamed for it. It was one of those
epiphany moments; and it was a shock to me.
Mama had a very pretty clock that Daddy had bought her and
brought it back with him, when he was discharged from the army. It was a clock
the likes of which I have never seen one like it again, in my life. I think it
must have been fairly rare; for sure it was here in the states. It was made of
china, not a very big clock, maybe ten or twelve inches tall. Dainty, a kind of
pendulum run clock, but the unique part was it had a little china girl in a
swing. She would swing on the hour; I’m not sure if she also swung on the
quarter hour or half hour, but for sure she did every hour, and I liked to
watch it, for she was very pretty, and I marveled over it.
Well, Mama kept it on the mantel over the fireplace; it was
a high mantel; Irene could not reach it from just her standing on tiptoe; so
she decided, under the guise of dusting that she would get up there closer
because she wanted to touch it. When she was on the chair she was reaching out
and somehow her grip was bad, and the clock slid and crashed on the floor,
hitting the hearth and smashing into so many pieces there was no fixing it back
together.
Mama heard the noise and rushed in from the kitchen; she
took in the whole room in a fast scan; I was on the floor over by the window;
and there was the chair and there was Irene nearby; but then Aunt Irene blurted
out, “Jerriann did it.” And Mama went into a fiery inferno; it was a fearful
sight.
Grabbed her by her hair, she started slapping Irene, not
just for breaking the clock, which was one of the few things Mama had she truly
loved and considered priceless, a treasure, but because Irene had tried to
blame me, and her lying to her made her
angrier than ever.
If she had shown remorse and admitted she did it, Mama would
have taken the loss easier and not been as upset, sorrowed but not that angry;
I know this because I heard Mama talk about it later and that’s what she said.
I remember how my mouth fell open when Aunt Irene said my
name and that I broke it; I know too, the only reason she tried to say it was
me was because five year old Holly wasn’t there and I was. I think Holly had
been with Daddy at the time; she would sometimes go with Daddy to the store;
not sure where she was at that particular time, but she wasn’t there when the
clock fell, because I was a bad choice to blame, being as I was learning to
walk about then, and not able to move a chair, climb in it and then up to the
mantel still more feet over my head; I think it would have been difficult for
Holly, too, at five years old; so Irene was the only one who could have pulled
it off, and she was the one, because I watched her, not guessing what was about
to happen.
Mama cried about that loss, and Irene knew she had earned
Mama’s wrath.
She played cool a little while, because she didn’t want to
be sent home; for the most part she liked to stay with my parents; she had fun
there in Henderson, and back home it was endless chores. She didn’t mind
helping out some as long as it wasn’t an all day long thing, she wanted to
spend time with her friends; she was a big ‘little’ kid, after all.
The apartment we lived in was in a really old building that
was built either in the late 1800s or the early 1900s; the upstairs had been
turned into apartments. We had the front apartment, and Rosey and her family
lived at the back. There was a skylight and it was over an open area that
looked all the way down to the first floor where Mrs. Melton lived, and also ran
a sewing and notions shop.
Irene loved the circus entertainers, especially the
tight-rope walkers and the flying trapeze artists. Well, one day Irene got it
in her head she was going to walk all the way around the railing and come back,
and she did it a time or two, but then she had to throw in a twist to this; she
grabbed me and got her chair in place and up she went; Holly went and got Mama
and when she saw Irene with me on that railing, she about had a stroke. She was
saying, “Irene get down from there now; you will fall and kill my child.”
Irene had been laughing, but when she saw that Mama was so
upset, and didn’t agree that this was a cool tight-rope balancing act kind of
trick, but instead was a ‘fool stunt,’ she froze and then her ankles did begin
to jiggle, and seeing Mama made me want down, so I think we did come close
there for a few seconds, but Mama managed to get close enough that she grabbed
hold of both of us and pulled us down to safety. She was so relieved, she
hugged us both, but later when Daddy got home and she told him, he was not so
delighted by the news.
This time, they both agreed Aunt Irene had gone too far.
They would take her home as soon as they could get the money for a trip south;
but before that happened, yet another memory occurred and this one was even a
bit more ominous, if that’s possible.
I remember this incident because of the long wait and the
frustration, even fear my mother had, and it stuck in my memory. It started off
a seemingly fun and relatively harmless event. It was late summer and the town
had a fair and there were rides set up. Cotton candy, hot dogs and drinks were for
sale.
There was one attraction that Aunt Irene was totally excited
about. It was called the Haunted Mill. At the top of this wooden contraption,
painted with spooks and big goofy country bloke type millers with sickles in
one hand and handfuls of wheat in the other, while bales of hay were banked
around the bottom in piles, along with corn shuck displays,was a catwalk balcony. Everything had
a garish splash of red paint spotted to resemble blood. My mother, at first,
refused to go in the place.
But with much coaxing, Mama agreed, taking me and Holly,
too. My sister was to stay close to Aunt Irene because most of the walk around
inside was done in the dark or with red filtered bulbs. As soon as we were out
of there, my Mother only then let her tight grip on me loosened; she told me I
had been a good girl because I hadn’t cried, but for her one trip in was
enough.
Aunt Irene wanted to
go back in with Holly, but Mama said, “No, Irene, we need to go home.”
Irene pleaded; and finally Mama gave her enough money for
one more ticket, but no, my sister wasn’t going along. So she went in with some
others in line, a couple of the girls Aunt Irene knew. We watched them go in at
the Haunted Mill doorway which was boarded so it looked slanted. This time she
went in, and we watched for when she would come out near the top and in view while on the balcony cat-walk type protrusion, which stretched a few feet, before
going in the door that had the circular flight of stairs that led down to the
ground.
Here is where it got scary, because the people Irene went in
with made their rounds inside and came our on that balcony and we watched for
Irene, and she wasn’t with them and they went across, giggling like everything
was fine, and then in the door that had the steps down to the exit, but as they
all came out, none of them was Aunt Irene; well, Mama got worried. She ran over
and asked those girls about Irene, they said, “Oh, wasn’t she before us?” But
no, she told them if she had been then she would be with her and she wouldn’t
be asking them. Oh it made Mama mad, but she was worried too.
“I’m not leaving until I find Irene,” she swore, so she went
to the guy at the door and demanded to know where her sister-in-law was. At
first it was this head-shaking.
“They’ve all left, and I’m shutting this down for the day.
Maybe she slipped off with a friend; go home; she’s probably already there.”
“No, she knew better than to do that. I was waiting and she
knew it. If you don’t go in there and find her I am getting the police over
here.” She meant it, and he knew it.
Seeing her fiery face, red hair and angry green eyes and the
claws she was beginning to curl out toward him, the dude backed off. “Hold on,
let me go look. If she’s not in there, I’ll get the police for you; I certainly
don’t want nothing bad happening in connection to my funhouse.” So he told her
to stay there with me and my sister and he disappeared inside.
It was a while before the man came out, and he had Irene by
the arm. She was disheveled and holding her head. The man said he found her on
the floor and thought she must have hit her head; we took her home and for a
while she acted strange; her energy seemed sapped, she didn’t want to go out
with her friends, was rare to get out of bed; she had bruises on her arms as
well as her head; just what had happened to her remained a mystery because she
wouldn’t tell Mama or Daddy, or anybody; she said she didn’t remember. If it
was that somebody jumped her, hurt her in there or if it was an accident she
did on her own, whatever the truth, we never knew; and depending on the true
severity of it, maybe it was a blessing Irene couldn’t remember, either.
Once she began to improve, she told them she wanted to go
home and she went. Sometime after that we moved; first to Payne’s and then to
North Alvis Street. I turned three there and Holly started in the first grade.
Aunt Irene came to visit with Uncle TJ Harville; either just before they got
married or right after. This would have been either still in 1960 or in 1961;
when it comes to dates, I’m not so good at recalling exactly; but I do know we
moved there from the Payne house just after thanksgiving and had Christmas
there in the new house, which Mama and Daddy decided they would buy.
After that, a period of several years went by. And it was
after we moved to Indianapolis when Charles was like 2 to 3 years old, that I
have memories with Irene and Uncle TJ, in their house near Beech Grove, a
sub-burg of Indianapolis, Indiana.
We stayed at their house a few days, until a place could be
found to move; I never understood why my folks moved so far downtown that it was the once opulent
old side of town we ended up living. Mama had a couple of brothers down that
way, but still not that close to where we moved.
Anyway, when we moved again, it was to a house owned by some
people named Underwood; they had all four of the houses on the north end of
Oakland Avenue. This was one street over from the street Aunt Irene lived on.
I won’t go into every iota that included Irene in it; there
are too many to cover in a short space. I will just say that she certainly was
colorful; and her actions much bigger than her size.
She had both a loving nature as well as a spiteful side to
her. She would hurt my mother by going by in front of our house with Mama’s
two nieces and others in tow and sometimes ignore that Mama was standing in the
yard; she also would make like she wasn’t home when she would be in her house
and either Mama and her three children came over, or maybe my sister and I had
come over, usually because Mama had sent us. We would hear the whispering,
maybe giggling and the ‘Shh’ remarks; it made us get so we wouldn’t go visit
them; the message was clear; she didn’t always welcome us.
After the time she
talked Mama into letting us come help her to clean her house, and then when TJ
got home she threw a fit and said we were ‘messing-gommers;’ saying she had
worked all day, house-cleaning, and we were trying to mess it up; that was when
we had started to sit on the couch, but Uncle TJ knew she had used us, and then
lied, trying to claim she did it on her own. He didn’t say a thing about him
knowing the truth of it; just said we had better go home now; and the money we
had been promised, we never received; that was it for my sister; by then I was
11 and she was 14 and she was getting tired of people with ‘two-faced’ ways.
One day, they were having a big to-do at their house and
several kin on both sides were there. The yard was full; they were planning a
BBQ; not sure if it was Memorial Day weekend or 4th of July or
something else. I just remember that Charles had been standing on their little
porch stoop and suddenly there’s a huge fight breaking out over my little brother
having pushed our little cousin Patty
Sue off the porch; I saw it but did no good; he was guilty according to all of
them. She lost her balance; he was on the other side not even looking at her at
the moment, and then it was pandemonium when the crying started; and Charles
was still standing on the porch, which made them all suspect he shoved at her.
My daddy had to step into the cat-fight and break it all up;
but after that Mama was ready to go home. She didn’t want to talk to her nieces
or two sister-in-laws or any of them; and I told her what I saw and she was
really upset then. Blaming her boy when he was innocent, but then that was
right up Aunt Irene’s alley, Mama said, referring to all these past days.
But there were some good times...one memory was one time
when we were with Mama over there. On
the TV I watched a show that gave me nightmares that night. It was the movie
with Bette Davis and Olivia DeHaviland set in Louisiana at one of the fine
plantation houses that still remains down there. Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte; I recognized it at age eleven as being
a Classic Horror movie, although I didn’t know how to describe it like that
back then.
I was impressed with it, because we had lived down there and
I had seen moss draped trees and big houses like that and heard the dialect of
the people, and ate its food and gone to school and walked the streets; it was
a place that won my heart; to this day I love Louisiana and miss it.
But on top of this, the story was about an axe murderer and
Bette Davis played the killer, Charlotte; she killed her lover at a party
her father was having; but she had spent a long time in the asylum, and was
finally back home, and improving; she was an heiress, and would inherit a good
sized bundle plus the house. There was a
song, very haunting, a tune played on the piano; Charlotte could play it, but sometimes
at night she would hear that song and go down in time to see a man, the one she
thought she had killed; she started believing the ghost of her former lover was
playing the piano; but every time she got down the stairs, he would already be
gone; her cousin, Olivia, had returned from somewhere, too, and she would be
the support-buddy, acting compassionate. The story grew more suspenseful as it
reached the end, having a twist that revealed the truth about the mystery of
that night.
Olivia had played the long suffering friend to Scarlett O’Hara
and the wife of Ashley, Scarlett’s secret love interest. In Gone With the Wind, all the way through
the story Olivia’s character had been meek, humble, gentle, kind, generous and
enduringly loyal; she has everyone’s sympathy and she was a big part of the
reason people disliked Scarlett, because they were so different. This was one
of both my mother and Aunt Irene’s favorite shows and she had gone with us to
the drive-in in Henderson. So when she saw that Olivia as well as Bette was in
the show she wanted to watch it; she got a surprise how scary Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte was, and so
did my mother and sister. We all sat there on the edge of our seats or hugged
and jumped in the scariest parts; such times as this was some of the best
moments.
Uncle TJ loved fishing, so one time; he talked Daddy
into going with him a few miles North, outside of Indianapolis to the Reservoir
and Mississinewa Lake; it was our family and Aunt
Irene and Uncle TJ; that was one of the best ever times; they rented a cabin;
we fished, hiked, cooked out, I got a sunburn from the light reflecting off the
lake. I was wearing a black dress with a purple violet like print on the border
and I remember that was the first time I felt truly ‘pretty’; Mama took one
picture of me in that dress where I walked along the side of the road with
these big trees like a forest beside and behind me; but others would say, 'girl,
you bloomed that day.' It was truly one of the finest times we ever spent with
them.
We ate the fish caught by my dad and
uncle; Daddy wasn’t much into fishing but he had an uncanny way of out-catching
anybody he went with; he would say, “Don’t get mad; I don’t try to outdo
anybody; fish just love the fly to my pole best.” It was all in good humor.
I
tried to fish too, but my catch was nothing that stands out, not like me in
that violet dress. I was 10 and maturing; already starting to fill out my tops,
on my way to becoming a young woman. Strange that it was on that fishing trip I
found myself truly being glad I was female.
Wasn’t too long after that, my maternal
grandmother passed away; something that broke my mother’s heart, and she never
truly got over losing Granny. We had to travel back down home; stayed a few
days, and then returned as soon as the funeral was over; the school didn’t like
that I had been going about four or five days, but Mama came in herself and
explained about the loss; I had quite a bit of homework to catch up on, and so
did Holly at her school; because Daddy and Irene’s aunt Eula Mae was married to
Mama’s brother Earl, which in an in-law way, made Mama their Aunt by marriage and
Granny a Great-Aunt; Aunt Irene and her husband as well as a number of others on Daddy’s side came to the funeral in September,1968. That was 44 years ago.
Aunt Irene had a full life, with many
fun events laced into her life; much I never knew about; in her later years,
she developed Arthritis and had back problems, added on some extra weight; I think
too she was diabetic. She had a surgery or two and came thru with a rebound
that is typical of us Law people. But then came the gall bladder surgery that
put her in a nursing home about the same time as my sister. Aunt Irene made it
to the 8th of May, ten days after my sister passed away. Her husband
took the blow well; but he was truly grieving; he loved his little woman; her
sister, my Aunt Athlene said on the way to the funeral, “well brother, it’s you
and me; we will have to watch after each other; sissy would have wanted us to.”
He was just stunned by her loss, missing her so much. They let me ride with
them as I had no other ride. I had been dropped off there by my brother and his
wife. Patty Sue, Aunt Athlete’s oldest daughter, drove her mother’s car, behind
the hearse to the cemetery.
Ther service went well; I ended up
sitting on top of my Aunt Shirley’s grave, theirs was next to The plots TJ had
purchased for them, a few years earlier; they already had a headstone too;
whereas both Uncle Jesse and Aunt Shirley had only name holders; their three
kids have not provided this for them, but maybe soon they will. Larry stood by
me; he was the one took me home. Just before we were to leave Uncle TJ wanted
his wife to have a light; she never liked the dark; always had a nightlight;
maybe a flashback to that Haunted Mill incident? I said to Patty Sue, “Jesus is
the light, you know.” She nodded, “yes, but TJ wanted her to have it; I put it
in her hand.” That was an act of kindness, to placate her husband; showing
their love. Goodnight, Irene.
I will miss you. I love you, yes,
goodnight, Aunt Irene; no more bedbugs to bite. No more pain.
Did the flashlight lead you on the sacred
path? I hope so. But greater is the light of the soul.
©May 16th , to the 18th,
Jerriann Law
