February 1,2012: I called my Aunt Peggy today for her 88th birthday. I sent her a card a few days earlier. But I made a commitment to myself to call her, because it is something my sister Nora would have done. Nora died October 29 of complications of ovarian cancer. I would always say to Nora, “Aunt Peggy left me a message. Would you call her back?” Aunt Peggy is a big talker, and Nora had more patience than I.
My Aunt Peggy is the last of my mother’s sisters, the last of the whole family really. My mom. Aunt Helen, Auntie Ann, Uncle Mike and Uncle Pat are all gone now.
I loved my mother’s family. I know that Mom – when she was around 20 or 21—would bring home whiskey and deli meats on Friday night to their tenement home on East 96th Street in Manhattan to “make a party.” I hear my mom’s words in my head, “Let’s make a party.” It’s a testament to her optimism and to her love of family.
My mother especially loved her mother and her baby sister Ann. I have letters she sent Ann when Mom was first married and in the Coast Guard with Dad during and right after World War II. She clearly loved her baby sister—who was around 14 years younger—and gave her lots of fashion advice.
Mom’s relationship with Aunt Peggy..who was 2 years younger than Mom..was more complicated. She thought Aunt Peggy was a hypochondriac, always complaining about imaginary ills. (But I would have to ask my Mom in heaven, “Who is still alive at age 88?")
And Aunt Peggy is still very clear in her thinking. My mother died of Alzheimer’s, but Aunt Peggy knows the name of the new place where she has moved, and she know what state my husband was visiting when I spoke to her a month ago. Bravo for you, Aunt Peggy.
My Aunt Peggy lived a half-block from our old home in Bergenfield, NJ before we moved when I was age 6. (We moved a couple of blocks east, closer to Tenafly, in 1959 or 1960, I think.) I remember Aunt Peggy making me incredibly smooth tuna fish salad in her blender when I stopped there for lunch when I was little. I remember exceptionally orderly built-in cabinets in her second-floor bedrooms built by Aunt Peggy’s Polish father-in-law. I remember my 2-year-younger brother Lou stopping at her house after he bolted from kindergarten, saying he had to help my mother hang diapers to dry.
My mother was uncomfortable with her sister Peggy. When we stayed overnight at Aunt Peggy’s house for some reason, my Mom remembered Peggy joking about all the little shoes in the mudroom. Mom had 6 children, Aunt Peggy two.
But Aunt Peggy is all we have left. And, blessedly, she still has her memory and some sense of perspective. Last year, I called her to put together a family tree and she remembered everything.
When I called her today, she said her husband had been through surgery overnight for blood clots in his legs. She calls him Uncle Walter. We called him Uncle Whitey for his very pale hair.
I, strangely enough, remember my Uncle Whitey when I was working in television in my mid-twenties. (That was 30 years ago.) I saw him in the subway in Manhattan joking with his friends. He was a printer for magazines then. He did not see me. I didn’t want to interrupt.
Aunt Peggy says the doctors say she has to agree to allow for amputations of his legs (because of blockages) or he will die. She doesn’t want to agree to amputations, too much for him to go through. She says, if we believe in prayer, we should pray for a speedy death. I remember Uncle Whitey in the subway, and know I shouldn’t interrupt. Prayer is what you do when there is nothing else to do. Prayer is powerful, and you do not control it.
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