In Memoriam: Helen

I apologize in advance; this may be a long post.

My great-Aunt Helen died at 11:10 am on Tuesday, May 5th. She was three months from her 90th birthday. She was in the presence of family, who called her passing gentle.

Tending her were her two sons, a daughter-in-law, a nephew and my mother, her niece. Her nephew was her landlord, who’d just come inside from mowing the lawn. That’s when her daughter-in-law said she couldn’t find a pulse. My mother found a pulse in her neck, but her breath was fading. So they all stood at her bedside watching the flame of her life flicker. Within ten minutes it was finished.

She died in a house she began her married life in with Walter, one of those Rollins boys. For the past few years, she’s rented it from a Rollins, too. Mathilde was the only daughter in a family of eight brothers, so she inherited the house from her mother. And from there, it passed to her daughter Louise.

It is a simple home, painted a cheerful canary yellow. It has a welcoming open porch, which used to have a porch swing. It is deceptively small looking from the outside, but inside the ceilings are high, perfect for keeping it naturally cool in the south Georgia humidity. The town was so small, she and her son Bennie could walk to church. And the house sits across the street from a senior center where they would go most days for lunch. The building had once been neighborhood's grade school. When Bennie was born, the doctors had told his mother that he should be institutionalized because he would never be “trainable.” She didn't do that, and Bennie attended that school along with his brothers and cousins, long before there were special education classes.

And when children called Bennie names, they were soundly beaten up by a tribe of brothers and cousins. So they stopped teasing him and made friends with him instead. Many of those children who once teased Bennie, who got a black eye or a bloody nose for their trouble, visited Aunt Helen in these last few weeks. Those days were distant memories. They’d become adults, friends and neighbors. And they were praying for her, because there was nothing else to offer. Even the garbage man had “Miss Helen” on his church’s prayer list.

Visit the sick. Bury the dead. There are some duties that are the glue of a community. Aunt Helen’s sons visited Mr. Strickland while my mother was there to make final arrangements for their mother and pick out the last things, like the lining of her casket. Mr. Strickland was the second Mr. Strickland, the son inheriting the business from the father, so they’d grown up with him. They returned in good spirits, commenting that they thought Tommy was relieved to have “men doing the choosing” for a change. The boys made short order of every decision. Everything was tasteful, but nothing fancy, none of the “Cadillac models.” She wouldn’t have liked that. She had pre-paid for her funeral already anyway.

My aunt never had a Cadillac life. She had known want. She’d known betrayal. But those aren’t the things that defined her life. I don’t remember her for her cooking. I don’t remember her for her sewing or writing. I do remember that she served wherever she was asked to serve. She did chores as one of twelve children. She was a mother to six children of her own. She was a pastor’s wife, in some of the most impoverished areas of south Georgia and Florida, where her husband’s ministry was less about passing the collection plate and more about finding working appliances for the congregation. I remember visiting them once when she and her husband showed off a shed they’d electrified so they could line it with freezers, storing day old discards, cheeses and milk. And afterwards, we visited as she stood at the kitchen sink. She was washing eggs. Her husband stocked groceries at a locally owned store. It allowed him to earn another wage and he’d convinced the grocer to donate the scratch and dent cans, the breads headed for the dumpster, and the cartons containing broken eggs. She was checking each egg for the unblemished ones. She was rinsing them. She was cleaning the egg cartons and repacking them. The people who came to their food pantry would not know they were getting castoff food. They would be getting a clean and full egg carton.

That is what she did all her life. She did dirty work. She sorted out the broken bits and saved what was good. She reassembled it and put it to good use. It may not be a Cadillac, but it was whole again, and served a purpose of its own.

Well after she had stopped talking, well after she had stopped responding to them, Aunt Helen’s sons would enter her room, lean over her bed and say, “I love you mom. It’s John. I just wanted you to know I love you.” Even the hospice nurse was impressed by it. She said it was unusual to see men act this way, or provide their mother’s care with such care, respecting her dignity. “Your mother has a unique family,” the nurse said. “This is a special environment.”

One of the brothers replied, “Well, we had unique parents.”

I can’t argue with that.

Good night, Aunt Helen. It's Laura. I love you, and I will miss you.

-Laura