Friday, November 10, 2006

Seashells and Siamese Kittens

I remember Halloween when I was about 13 years old. My Aunt Bobbie, after whom I am named (middle name), was up from Florida. She was dying of brain cancer. She wore a kerchief on her bald head and smelled funny. This was not the Aunt Bobbie I remembered from visiting. That woman had hair; she wore glasses and was always laughing and making me laugh.

She sat in the recliner in the living room that night and we set up a video camera at the front door that broadcast all the little trick-or-treaters onto the television in the living room. She got to witness one last Halloween, adapted for her illness. She stayed in Connecticut for awhile, undergoing treatments and surgery. Details are blurry to me because of my youth. She flew back to Florida with her daughters.

The next summer my dad and I drove the white van she had left up here down to Florida. It was one of those funny ones that had a big bump behind the front seat. Was it the engine? Or the gas tank? I don't know; I just remember that it was cool. Her house was cool too. It was just a short walk from the beach. I spent the majority of that trip down at the beach hunting seashells or on her porch playing with her Siamese cat and its kittens. She had jars and jars of seaside treasures decorating her porch and yard, full of shells, beach glass, starfish, just everything I could imagine. There were sand fleas. You would dig and dig in the beach sand and the little sand fleas would scurry further down their holes. I could never dig far enough or fast enough to catch one.

One day Aunt Bobbie got mad. She yelled at her daughter because her friend had called and said she was coming to visit and why wasn't she here? Aunt Bobbie wanted to call her friend so badly to see if she was okay, to yell at her for not coming over. She could not get what had now become a child-like brain around the idea that her friend was in fact dead and could not have called her.

We flew back to Connecticut. On the plane ride up there was a cute older boy bragging about how he got to drive his very own golf cart while he was in Florida so I lied and said I had too. I never saw Aunt Bobbie after that. I heard about how she was in the hospital and they were just waiting for her to die, and then she did.

I loved the old Aunt Bobbie very much--the Aunt Bobbie with hair and glasses, who laughed and made me laugh, the Aunt Bobbie who had walked down to the beach so many mornings and collected all those beautiful treasures from the sea, who had bred Siamese cats. The Aunt Bobbie I had been named for.

The one who interfered with my Halloween with that stupid video camera, who looked scary with no hair and smelled funny, the one that didn't remember her friend had died, didn't remember me, and got mad for the forgetting...she scared me, disgusted me. I resented her for the attention she got from everyone. And then one day she was gone too and there was neither of the two Aunt Bobbies.

My niece had an argument with my mother the other day. She told my mom that she doesn't like to go over to the house anymore, that it's not fun anymore. That my mom isn't the same. My mom asked when things changed and Vicky responded that it was when she started living at the house during the week.

My mom said, "That's when I got sick."

My niece is ten. She is three years younger than I was with Aunt Bobbie, and she is so much more connected to Mom than I was to my aunt. Mom isn't as bad as Aunt Bobbie was that last year, but she has stretches of time that are worse than others, and the house is darkened by the cloud of cancer. Even the happiest moments in that house are tinged with bittersweetness because we are all aware now of how precious these times are.

What can I say to her? What can I do to make the dealing easier when I don't know how well I'm dealing myself? I just hope she is able to remember the seashells and Siamese kittens
of these times.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh Tina. This was such a touching post. Illness is so hard on everyone. Hugs, babe.

dan said...

One of the things about living through death is that as you get older and see it and deal with it, you get to know it's in and outs.

It's never easy. But you are right. It's the memories you made of the best times that are worth the journey.