I stayed in the passenger seat of the car and listened to the radio while she went inside the bank to deposit a check. I didn't have my CD player, so I kept flipping through the channels trying to find a decent song. There's never a decent song on the radio. And she was taking forever. A half an hour later she walked out of the bank with a huge grin on her face. Usually her movement was slow and painful to watch, but she seemed to have a spring in her step now. She got in the car and told me about what happened inside. One of the other patrons had recognized her. It was someone she went to high school with. I think she said they dated briefly. They talked for a few minutes and caught up, and then he looked over at the teller and said "Do you know who you're talking to? That was the most beautiful girl in high school."
"Was" being the key word. Over the years since high school my aunt's appearance had changed dramatically. She had been maimed and handicapped by a car accident that resulted in several surgeries and the removal of her ankle. It was a gnarly sight, but easily hidden. She couldn't however, hide the 200 pounds she had gained, bringing her to a weight of over 300 pounds. The shame of her weight often came up at moments that seemed so odd when I was a kid, so when she was suddenly began weeping just a few minutes after telling this story, I knew it was about her weight. Like everyone, her flaws were numerous. She was blind to almost all of them except her weight.
I called her Annie, a mishmash of "Aunt Jenny" because I couldn't enunciate the full words as a child. At a certain point I could say the full name, but the name stuck and we kept it around as a relic.
Annie never grew up. That was both her greatest flaw and her greatest feature. Her whole life she lived at home with her mom, my Grandma. When my parents wanted a night to themselves they would send my brother Brian and I over to Grandma's house to spend the night, and we would hang out with Annie. On the most fun nights my cousin Jackie would come over and the three of us kids would jump into Grandma's car and Annie would drive us all around Kettering and Dayton letting us yell and holler at strangers from the car window. Or she would drive us to a restaurant that she knew had helium balloons so that we could all make high pitched voices in the car. When we were feeling spooky she'd drive us past the "Witch's Tower" in Kettering and turn the lights off in the car and tell us ghost stories in the pitch black of night. She'd stay up late with us and play Monopoly or perform a séance and let us drink Grandma's wine coolers. And whenever I wanted to play hooky from school, I knew that I could bypass my mom's better judgement by calling Annie, and she would come check me out of school, no questions asked.
She was a perfectly imperfect aunt. She was always more comfortable around children, so we all got to experience a side of her that no adult ever could. Though she never let us get away with doing "something stupid", she was never motherly or disciplinary. And if we ever got caught in bad behavior by our parents or some other authority figure, she always took our side. She was our great defender. She was there to take care and comfort us in times of need or struggle. She was our friend when we had none.
Throughout elementary and middle school, I was overweight. I had zero self-confidence and almost no one that I could call a friend. Often I would head over to Grandma and Annie's house after school and stay inside all night playing video games. Brian, my mom, and I even lived at Grandma's house for over a year while my parents were going through their divorce. I never saw Annie as an authority figure and I never looked up to her or sought her advice. To me, she was always an equal. So while most kids never get very close to their aunt, for a long period of time, Annie was probably my only friend.
As I entered my adolescence, I started to grow apart from her. My body had gone through a growth spurt, and thus I was no longer the fat kid in class. I had friends, with the possibility of girlfriends. Life wasn't just about hanging around Grandma's house anymore. To further complicate things, by 2004 Grandma had been in and out of hospitals and nursing homes. Annie basically lived alone in Grandma's house and took care of her with little assistance from her six brothers and sisters. That meant that Annie would lean on me and Brian to do more chores around the house and to help out with Grandma. Before long I would start dodging her calls, and whole days would go by without calling her or going over to the house. It wasn't anything personal. I was just growing up. Annie stayed the same.
I noticed Annie's rapidly deteriorating health all at once. It snuck up on all of us. The leg was giving her more trouble. There was an open wound at the bottom of her heel that would have to be continually re-bandaged. It could never heal though, because whenever she would walk, her excessive weight would cause the wound to split open again. On top of that she was sleeping for days at a time. But she said that she had been to the doctor and he had found nothing wrong. She said she just needed to rest.
Weeks later she was still confined to the bed and seemed to only be getting worse. When she was awake, her words came out through wheezing, and her eyes would roll back and she'd fall asleep in the middle of a sentence unless she sat straight up. Because she didn't get out of bed very often, she would frequently call my mom, brother, and I to run errands for her, do a few house chores, or even just get her food from the kitchen. This wasn't easy. It often meant I would begrudgingly walk an hour from my mom's apartment to Grandma's house just to get her a bowl of cereal. Weekend plans were moved around to accommodate trips to the store for her.
One day mom was taking me to get a new cell phone and we stopped at the house to drop off some food for Annie. I brought it inside for her and had to help pull her up from the bed. I wasn't strong enough on my own, but when she shifted her body weight and I got the right leverage, we managed to sit her upright briefly. She asked me to wait while she finished eating, and I stood quietly, anxious to leave. When she finished eating she said "You'd be proud of me. I walked all the way around the bar yesterday". "The bar" was just down the hallway, near the living room. Maybe 50 feet total distance. She was able to make this walk just a few weeks before with no problem. I wasn't proud. I wasn't really sure how I was feeling. Again she reassured me that she had already seen a doctor and that she just needed to rest a few more days and then she would be fine. I wanted it to be reassuring. Still I rushed my visit, anxious to get a new phone. My mom and brother were outside waiting in the car. I made sure that she had everything she needed, gave her a hug, and headed for the front door.
As I opened the door she called back to me, "Mikey?".
Yes?
"I love you"
I love you too Annie.
Something about the way she said it felt so sad and concerning. I could barely get the words out of my own mouth without crying. I wasn't sure why she felt the need to say it. I had told my aunt that I loved her before, but this instance caught my emotions off guard. Seeing her condition so much worse - to the point that she couldn't even walk around the house anymore - scared me. For a moment I wondered whether it would be the last time I would speak to her. But no, I thought, she has been to the doctor. They've looked her over. She's going to be okay. I just kept telling myself that.
Just a few days later, on April 20 or 21, Annie was in the hospital. Aunt Linda, had stopped by one day and found her unconscious. When the ambulance arrived they had to wait for more men to come just to lift Annie out of the bed. During her stay at the hospital, my mom drove my brother and I to visit her in the intensive care ward several times, but I never wanted to be there. She looked so massive on the hospital bed. She was either very bloated, or she had gained more weight during the sickness. Her absence was becoming more noticeable and uncomfortable, but people kept reassuring me that she would get better and that the hospital was taking good care of her. They told me she would get better. I thought she would get better. I just kept telling myself that.
As all of this was going on, my Aunt Linda was moving into a new house. The whole move was a disaster. On the first day, when the U-haul truck full of furniture arrived, the sliding door of the truck wouldn't open. They had to call U-haul, who came to the house to cut the door off the truck and found an empty gallon milk jug was stuck on the door track. On the second day, I was in charge of guiding Uncle Rick while he backed the truck up near the garage. I remember making a hand motion to get him to stop the truck, but I must not have gesticulated properly because he kept going and backed the truck into the house. They never asked me to come back and help after that, but the next day Rick drove the truck over the mailbox.
Annie was in the hospital for two weeks. At the end of the first week she woke up. Because she couldn't breath on her own, she had a tube in her mouth that prevented her from speaking. Several other family members were there. I wasn't, but Aunt Linda later told me what happened. She said that she told Annie about all the problems with the move and when she told her about Rick backing over his own mailbox, Annie laughed. It was a good story. She could laugh. Things must be getting better. I just kept telling myself that.
The last time we visited her at the hospital was May 2, 2004. I was told that the doctors had sedated her into a medical coma. Mom told me that Annie had pneumonia in both lungs. It had a name now. Pneumonia. That's curable. As we watched over Annie's comatose body, Mom kept coaxing me to say something to her, but I couldn't do it. It felt strange to me. I knew she couldn't hear me. And besides I thought that she'd get better. She'd lose weight. The hospital would get her healthy again. I'd have my aunt back. I just kept telling myself that.
It was a Sunday night and I was preparing for school in the morning. I was going to go bed early that night because it was the last couple weeks of school, and I had a girlfriend, so I was actually excited about school now.
Just a little after 10pm, Aunt Linda called me on my new cell phone and asked to speak to my mom. Aunt Linda never calls and Aunt Linda never wants to speak to my mom, so I knew something was wrong. Brian and I paced around our room and thought about what could be the matter. We both assumed that Grandma was dead. That would be okay. The concept and personality of Grandma had been gone for more than a year. Her whole existence was eradicated by dementia. She had no quality of life. It was sad to see her so deteriorated. Hearing that Grandma was gone would have been somewhat of a relief, and an end to her pain.
Mom came back in the room and delivered the news that we didn't expect.
"Annie passed away tonight."
It is hard to explain just how devastating those words were. It felt at once as if everything was lost. Where there was once land, now there was a yawning chasm. The world split itself into two. Before and after. Complete and broken. Full and empty. Here and gone. Life and death. I have never cried, never felt so much pain as that Sunday in May. Our greatest defender, our greatest friend, our greatest aunt was forever gone.
She died a single, unemployed, 46 year old who still lived at home with her with mother, and with only a high school education. In almost every way her life was un-extraordinary. She was cremated just a few days after her death. A ceremony was held at Aunt Linda's church. The weather was cool and sunny, but during the pastor's speech, in the middle of some nonsense platitude, the power went out. The pastor paused for a quiet moment and looked at the urn. All at once the room took a breath, and the pastor began to pray. It was the most eerie coincidence. It made me want to believe in god and ghosts.
At the end of the ceremony, I watched my Aunt Linda pick up the urn with the remains of her younger sister and begin to walk down the aisle of the church. About halfway down the aisle Aunt Linda clutched the urn tight to her chest and, as if the gravity of the situation finally hit her, she began to wail and cry. I can think of no scene more painful that her contorted face and endless tears, carrying the heavy ashes of her younger sister. Brothers and sisters that barely spoke to each other for so many years then crowded around her to comfort each other and hold their young sister.
For the first time, I considered what lives after death. One day I will have to bury my own father and mother. One day my own brother will have to bury me. Or maybe life will be as cruel to me as it was to the generation that reared me. Maybe I will have to bury my brother.
Dear god I don't want to bury my own brother.
I never actually saw my aunt's body. Consciously I know that she's gone. Unconsciously I've never been able to cope. To this day I have a recurring lucid dream that Annie is still alive and she's been waiting in the house for me to come over and find her there. She tells me that she had to hide from the government or some mafia organization, and that she's been sending out clues that I needed to come to find her at the house. I know that the story is ridiculous, but I want to believe that it's true. I know that I'm dreaming but I want to believe it's real.
I told my dad and brother about this dream once. They keep having it too.
For several weeks after she died, I would walk from my mom's apartment to Grandma's house listening to punk rock in the CD player I squeezed into the pocket of my now baggy jeans. Someone still had to mow the lawn while the house was being sold, and I quietly took upon the task myself. I didn't have a key to the house, but I knew that I could sneak in through one of the windows. My brother and I had once used this window to sneak groceries into the house for Annie while she was sick, just to avoid having to do other chores.
One day while I was inside the house, the phone rang. I didn't pick it up. I shouldn't have been there in the first place, and I didn't know what I would say if I picked up the phone and the person didn't know that my aunt was dead. The answering machine came on and my Annie's voice echoed into the room. "Sorry we can't come to the phone right now but if you leave your name and number we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thank you." For a moment she was alive again. The old recording stopped and the caller hung up the phone. Silence returned. But the house was now haunted by her voice.
I unplugged the phone cord from the answering machine and walked to the front door of the house. With the last breath in my lungs I opened the door, called out "I love you too", closed the door, and never went back.
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