Today is my Aunt Mary’s 91st birthday. She is the last in the line of the siblings from Daddy’s family. Russell, my daddy, his older brother Pat and younger brother Ray, sister Frances, and from Mother’s side, both she and her brother are gone from this the only reality we truly can know. I suppose there are those who might have glimpsed the other side, even claimed to have visited it, but this is the life most of us confess, and it is in this life we miss those we have loved and lost. I remember asking the Lutheran pastor and Baptist chaplain who officiated at Mother’s funeral 18 months ago, “where is Mother today, as we sit here?”. Neither had a profound answer. The cheerful chaplain simply referenced scripture, “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). The somewhat reserved Lutheran answered another question I asked—in eternity, will we know those who have been part of our earthly family?—by saying that he someday will fish again with his dad.
When I visited Aunt Mary just after Easter last spring, she seemed to enjoy talking about her early years—those with her blood family. And during the course of the few hours that my middle sister Sue and I spent with her that day, she talked lovingly about the memories we shared—those that still remained clear to her—although she became confused as we were leaving, asking Sue, “now what is your name?”
I’ve been away from Texas much of the time since Mother died, I guess in an effort to sate the wanderlust that I must have inherited from the boys on the Hollis side of the family. Only Uncle Pat left Texas, to raise his three boys in northern New Mexico, and eventually to die and be buried in Arizona. Ray didn’t really wander much, although I sensed that spirit in him, as I did in the few stories Daddy shared with us about his limited travels—mostly looking for work during the depression—after he and Pat left East Texas as teenagers. Were they courageous? I trust that they just did what was expected of young men, especially in tough times.
Aunt Mary, who is childless, used to love talking about her few trips to New Mexico to visit Uncle Pat’s family, but I don’t think she ever had a desire to be anywhere other than here on the Gulf coast with her Willaim Woodrow Todd and near all the rest of her kin. She has told me many times since his death in 2000 that she is “ready to go” because she misses him. “I’ve had a good life,” she affirms. Our Mother certainly had no interest in being away, even traveling for enjoyment. On the only family vacation that ever took us out of state—to Santa Fe New Mexico in the early 1950s—she was ready to head back to Harris County Texas, and almost immediately after our arrival in Santa Fe wrote her mother a letter saying that we would be back, on whatever certain day she named in the letter. Grandma Fuchs would have been maybe 55—born in 1897. Only a week separates the birthdays of Aunt Mary, then Mother, and then mine—September 2, September 9, and September 16. How did Aunt Mary become 91? I am amazed to realize that Mother was short of her 90th birthday by only seven months. And here I am, just two weeks shy of 65. As of September 1, I am officially on Medicare. My oldest sister, Joan, is 70. I am the baby of the family.
Today a few of the few who remain gathered for lunch in the house on the land Grandma bought for Mother and Daddy in 1973. Present were our Aunt Edna, the widow of Mother’s brother Frank William Fuchs—affectionately known all of his life as Bubba—Joan, our cousin Becky, and Becky’s daughter and grandson. Hurricane Gustav had uprooted Becky and family from their homes near the coast in southeast Texas. It was nice getting to visit with her. She is actually Mother’s first cousin, the daughter of the youngest of our maternal Grandma Fuchs’s siblings. Becky’s mother (Aunt Lea) was born in 1904 and died of breast cancer when Becky was only six—1954, only a couple of years after the Hollis family vacation to deliver Mamaw Hollis to Uncle Pat’s in Santa Fe. Our maternal great grandmother Louisa Benfer Fuchs was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and Becky has been afflicted as well, seriously for going on 20 years. Joan showed Becky a gorgeous studio-quality photograph of Louisa laid out in her casket—taken almost 70 years ago, the first time in many years that Louisa had been in a reclining position because of her painful physical condition. Over the last couple of days we enjoyed bittersweet memories and some laughs as we monitored the storm's progress on cable network news and talked about the upcoming presidential election, and as we sat at the lunch table today I remembered , “Today is Aunt Mary’s 91st birthday.”
We’re making our way, the walking wounded—conscious and breathing, with relatively minor injuries. We are the survivors among our close kin. When I considered my return to Texas for a while, I thought mostly about all the responsibilities waiting here for me—a garden much overgrown, other responsibilities begging my attention and action—but I didn’t know that a hurricane would drive a few of us together for a reunion of a precious few and that I would remember in the course of lunch that we need to send flowers to Aunt Mary in honor of the second year into her ninth decade. I pointed out to Aunt Edna, who will turn 83 on her next occasion, that she is the younger of the only two who remain from the generation of our parents, their siblings and their spouses. Today is indeed a day for celebration.
A Day For Celebrating—Normangee, Texas (September 2, 2008)
R. Harold Hollis
No comments:
Post a Comment