May 2011 - OutreachNC Magazine

I felt awful that I wasn’t taking
advantage of this wonderful
opportunity, but the truth is,
I didn’t want to talk to my
dead aunt. I was afraid
she would tell me about
the things I couldn’t help
imagining when I lay in
bed in the still-dark morning
just before my alarm clock went
off, like how awful it was never to be able to
turn over and lie curled up on your side, or how you
knew you were decomposing, but couldn’t do anything
about it. I tried to persuade myself that we were all
decomposing, even while we were alive, but it didn’t
help. All the polite questions you ask people when you
haven’t talked to them in a while have to do with the
present. How are you doing? What are you up to?
The person I really wanted to talk to was my aunt
before she died. I think maybe after she got sick,
because there was something about being sick that
sharpened her personality. I’d seen minor illnesses do
that to a person’s body, you know, when you drop five
or ten pounds because you have an awful flu and can’t
keep anything down and when you finally get your
color back and start walking around, everyone tells
you what great bone structure you have and they can’t
imagine why they haven’t noticed it before. Barbara
had always seemed kind but fluffy to me, as if she had
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OutreachNC • May 2011 35
to be nice to everybody in a sort of vague and
all-encompassing way. When she got ill, she
became both nobler and wickedly funny. I heard
from my cousin that she said the “F” word once.
No one had known this was in her repertoire.
The Barbara I wanted to talk with was the one
who was ill but still knew she would beat it.
She kept saying that - “We’re going to beat
this thing” - long after she stopped believing
it. My sisters were shocked when she died. They’d
believed her.
I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me that she
would be on the line. In the last few months, she
roamed around the house trailing miles of oxygen
cord, laughing as she told you not to trip over it.
“When are you coming home?” It seemed the sort of
thing you ask someone who’s been away a long time,
someone you miss.
“Soon,” she said, and I wanted to tell her to pick up
something in the airport shop to bring home to me,
some memento of her trip, but I knew she wasn’t the
kind of person who had to do that. She would have
done her shopping long ago, and would bring us
shopping bags full of gifts wrapped in poppy-covered
paper, and in a flat box for me would be the shawl
she gave me once, made of wool and silk, woven by
worms and lost to the moths.
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