I love my Aunt Shelby.
When I was a little girl and lived with my dad in Marysville, he’d take us to see our aunt. She is his sister, the only girl out of 5 boys. They all grew up in Clay County, in a holler, pretty poor. My grandpa was a coal miner until a coal cart crushed his back.
But Shelby married a young hillbilly at 17 and moved north to Cincinnati, or actually a town in Northern Kentucky, a suburb of Cincinnati. They didn’t have any money, she was pregnant and my uncle was a booze hound. I wasn’t born yet, or either of my siblings. Despite his love of alcohol he worked like a dog in a foundary in Cincinnati. She birthed my cousin and once he was old enough she went to work in a toy factory on the toy line.
She worked like a dog, so hard that management took note. Within a few years she was running the factory office and over three secretaries. She didn’t come home with bloody hands anymore but she still worked 12 -18 hours a day.
From there she continued climbing the corporate ladder with her hillbilly accent and pragmatic way of doing things. She is intelligent and not afraid of work so she and my uncle, once he stopped drinking a couple decades ago, have done very well for themselves.
In the interim my sister, me and my brother were born, parents divorced, mom split, and dad got custody by default at a time when men did not generally take their kids after divorce.
Dad is also a hillbilly educated to the 8th grade. He also has a strong work ethic so we never went hungry. He picks and sings and has a talent for musical instruments. While we never went hungry we did do without sheets on the beds sometimes, and often a dirty trailer. Women came and went because he played music and well, groupies don’t just follow stars they sometimes just follow a band, living for the five minutes of attention from the bass player in a smoky bar. Dreaming I guess he will write songs about them, or so I’ve been told.
Occasionally, when dad didn’t have a gig, he’d load us up in his green Chevy and drive us to Aunt Shelby’s. Looking back most of those visits occurred around Christmas. His sister worked for a toy manufacturer. My dad was no dummy.
Going from a tiny dirty trailer, with a small black and white tv (I’d watch the Dukes of Hazzard on every Friday night), to my aunt’s home, was exciting for me. When we’d get a couple blocks from her house my heart would start racing. I was sure a car was gonna plow into us denying us the monumental opportunity of eating such rich foods and sleeping on such clean soft sheets. The two hours it took to drive from Marysville to Cincinnati were almost too much to bare.
We pulled up to a beautiful home on the hill with Christmas lights and all the wonderful smells of Christmas pouring over us. As a child I’d watch the Christmas commercials and wonder if people really lived like that, if you had to be filthy rich to have Christmas presents and a tree. My aunt lived the commercial.
She always put me in the cedar bedroom. A bedroom suit made from cedar that belonged to a long lost relative. It was my place when I visited and I’d lounge on those clean sheets and fantasize about living there, about that being my room. I’d count the days until I would be forced back to my real life. I wanted Christmas week to last forever.
Eventually I did end up going to live with her. Dad married a groupie who hated me and was mental so life got sticky. Enter CPS, some time in a group home, and then my aunt Shelby tracked me down and came for me.
I went to live in that cedar bedroom. She spent the next year and a half teaching me all the things girls are supposed to know including keeping me up until 2am to teach me how to walk in pumps. She banned the hair brush I carried in my back pocket to a small hand held purse. She taught me how to apply makeup, less is more, and how not to dress. She believes if a woman doesn’t define herself as a lady, then no one else will. She taught me that being a lady isn’t about what you wear but how you make other people feel when they are around you, especially in your home.
I moved away with my job after high school and shortly after that married. My husband’s job has kept us on the road and far from home for 20 years, though we always came back to stay with her for a week every year and visit.
This year however we moved back for good. She is dying. She has cancer, lung cancer, in both lungs and it’s spreading.
My husband is gone a lot so I don’t see her as much as I’d like. It’s about an hour from my home to hers. I don’t go with the kids to see her too often because it is so draining to be around a 2 year old. She says it doesn’t matter, but I see how tiring it is for her.
She stopped chemo a year ago. It was making her too ill. She wanted time to be healthy and not full of sickness. She took Aressa (sp?) and it held the cancer in place for 12 months. So she’s had 12 months of good living…if you call having a death sentence hanging over your head good living. But now it’s spreading again.
When my husband comes home I go see her. Just me. I stay in the cedar bedroom and try to remember that I am an adult now and usually spend a night or two and help her around the house. We bond through cleaning or physical labor of some sort, always have.
A few weeks ago I spent two days helping her clean out kitchen cabinets. This weekend I helped her go through her closet and pick out the outfit she will be buried in. She showed me several outfits she likes, but couldn’t bring herself to say the words. She told me she didn’t want to be buried in red and that she needed to find a young professional to give all her suits too since she has retired.
She sold her recreational vehicle to pay for her funeral. All nice and tidy.
And the whole time I’m thinking, the WRONG person got cancer. Not that I wish my uncle ill, but he was the one who pissed away his life on alcohol. He was the one laying out all night drunk for years while she raised my cousin alone. He should be the one to have it if it must be one of them.
It is almost an out of body experience to watch someone you love die slowly. Her cancer was found by accident, she was having her kidney’s scanned and they got the bottom part of her lung and saw it. So she has more time than most, like Peter Jennings. But I don’t know if that is such a good thing sometimes. She’s had 18 months now of living with this hopeless prognosis. And 18 months of planning.
And I watch. And I listen. She has so many regrets. And I see in the reflection of her life a gaping hole. She never really had a partner in life. My uncle was a drunk for so many years, and I guess she didn’t leave because she was from the country and women didn’t leave their husbands in the country. They did what they were told and sucked it up. But any love, any spark of it was obliterated before she was out of her teens.
I don’t want her to die for purely selfish reasons. She is my place in our family. She is the reason her brothers see one another. It is her house everyone drifts too on holidays. Her will that pulls family reunions together every year, her being that makes us all a family.
When she is gone our family will dissipate to a loose unfamiliar fold. The same as it was before she took on bringing us all together.
But really for me, there is no place in the family for me without her. Not in her small unit or in our much larger extended one.
Selfish I know. She is dying and I am worried about my place in a family that will cease to exist once she goes.
Her home is neutral territory. A place everyone can meet because no blood has ever been spilled there. There is no other such place my family would care to go, or frankly would have the motivation to go, certainly not my home…too much blood under a bridge blown away years ago by anger and frustration.
And so we are watching her die. And the typical platitudes people give her in my presence have me cringing. But I have uttered the same words in one form or another in similar situations. It all translates to…”This really sucks for you. I am so glad I don’t have lung cancer. I will miss you when you are gone.”
Standing in the closet of a 50 something woman watching her calmly pick out clothes to be buried in, it is surreal.
No one close to me has ever died. It is coming and I really wish it wasn’t. Selfish. I know.
I love my Aunt Shelby.