My shrine to my dead family
I have a 95 year old neighbor, Miss Katie who lives downstairs from me and whom I adore.
She will be 96 this coming June.
She amazes me - her stories, her embodiment of living history.
She has great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.
Her daughters are both senior citizens. One is in a wheelchair in a nursing home. Her son has passed away.
One of her daughters come to visit her often. She was born the same year as my mother in 1952.
Sometimes though I am a bit baffled at what that would be like - to be 73 years old and to still have my mother with me.
My mother didn’t make it to 72. She passed at 67.
I can’t imagine - this woman has had her mother with her for four decades longer than I had mine.
Forty years.
That boggles my mind.
I also paused to consider this, as I looked around my apartment and the pictures that I have on display.
My apartment photo display could better be described as a shrine, a temple erected for Dia de los Muertos or homage to my ancestors like I’m from China -because almost everyone is gone: my parents, my brother, grandmothers, great aunts, mentors, friends - all of whom have walked on.
Then I consider the one picture I have, of Miss Katie, wearing a witch’s hat on Halloween. How ironic that the one who was born in the 20’s is still alive and kicking.
I know that other people do often lose people prematurely, that I am not some rare exception to this.
But, some people don’t.
And I kind of marvel at those people and what their realities are like.
My peers who are only now losing grandparents.
Ones who still have siblings who are alive.
I didn’t expect to become the only survivor, living member of my nuclear family, at the ripe old age of 39.
Sometimes it makes me feel older than my 41 years.
Perhaps that’s the trauma talking - and at those moments I feel fatigued; my body feels tired. But I think it’s also the emotions and loss and mental exhaustion playing out.
It’s odd though because I truly don’t wish my family members were still here.
Perhaps that sounds cruel, but I don’t.
They were miserable. They were unwell. They were suffering. They wanted to die and were unable or unwilling to get help to address what they needed to do in order to get well.
I like to believe them at peace now, no longer in tortured mental (and, for my parents, physical) agony.
Because, really, even if I didn’t - what other choice would I have? To do so would be to torture myself, to open up ample opportunities for survivor’s guilt.
But for today, I simply, quietly, shake my head in amazement at how some people’s extended family plays out, in very, very different ways.