Family Visits

Yesterday Aunt Ann and I had a delightful phone conversation.  We discussed her recent visits from family.  Ann is Mom’s sister and lives in beautiful Sedona AZ.  Her balcony looks out to the glorious terracotta hills for which Sedona is famous. 

At 98 (and a half, Auntie specifies) Annie Laurie has outlived all her 9 siblings.  This is ironic because, according to family lore, she’s been a hypochondriac all her life.  Even Ann agrees and chuckles with an incredulous shake of her surprisingly youthful head.

Family stories about Ann’s idiocyncracies are legendary.  She has professed to seeing auras.  She was a health freak long before it was popular, hanging upside down on a bar to stretch out her spine, juicing carrots and religiously drinking the juice 2-3 times a day.  For awhile, she and Uncle Mark drank so much carrot juice that they sported a full-body, mustard jaundice hue, as did her children. It’s true.

I love Aunt Ann’s phone calls. She’s a hoot and she laughs at my jokes.  She loves sparkle and bling.  These days, the best gifts, we can give her are glittering caps, phone calls, and letters. 

Her conversations cover a wide array of topics due to a broader worldview than many of our kin.  Being from California, Uncle Mark, her late husband and NASA engineering guy, probably contributed to that.  They lived near the East Coast family for a few years, then spent most of their adult lives out west – Texas, Utah, Arizona. 

Today Mark was on Ann’s mind.  He and his new wife visited.  Frankly, I was flabbergasted that he’d divorced Aunt Ann and I told her so.  “Well,” she said, “He looks really good and he wanted someone younger” . . . and (I paraphrase here) able to give him more physical attention.

Sorry if I’ve confused you with seeming contradictions of Mark’s life-after-death conversations.  He died in 2015 and started visiting Annie again a couple of years ago after she fell and hit her head.  Theirs has been an emotionally rocky reacquaintance, as his remarriage indicates.  But Ann is okay with it now, she says.

In addition to Mark, yesterday her parents and her sisters, Louise and Frances, dropped by.  I asked about each of them and we gossipped a bit.  Ann said Louise (my mother who’s on the front row, far right in the family photo) was wearing herself out taking care of grama and refused to let anyone else help.  “Yes,” I said, “That’s just like Mom.  She’ll work herself to death.”

Despite what it sounds like, Aunt Ann hasn’t lost her mind.  It’s more like she’s gained a parallel universe.

Ann’s memory is good.  Her grasp of her three living children and numerous grands and great-grands is usually intact.   She knows where she lives and when to go to the cafeteria and who her nurses are.  That is, she knows unless discussing her formerly-thought-dead family.  Then the details are more fluid.

Ann accepts her second reality because it’s vivid and detailed.  Simultaneously, she knows that her thoughts about long-gone relatives don’t make sense.  She seems to be able to carry these opposing concepts side-by-side, so I changed the subject to take advantage of her unique insights. 

“Aunt Ann, I wish I could get inside Dad’s head to understand what’s going on in there,” I said.  “I realize that you don’t always think so clearly these days either.  Do you have any suggestions for me?”

“Yes, honey,” she said, ” Just listen and go along with him, Mary Lou.”

Sage advice from one who really does understand.