September 17, 2002
My Aunt Helen died today. She died in her sleep, and the nurses found her this morning in bed with a smile on her face. I don't know if that's true or just something nurses tell family members, but it made me feel somewhat better. She was 92 years old and had broken her hip in December. She never seemed to recover from that. Why is that? Why do people who break their hips never seem to jump back up after doing so?
Helen was my great aunt, and that doesn't seem to carry as much weight when giving out the information that I've lost a family member. Apparently, aunts, let alone great aunts, don't mean as much as say a grandparent, but to me Aunt Helen was that. My maternal grandmother died a year or so after I was born, and I have no memories of her. My paternal grandmother died when I was seven, and while I have some vague memories of her, I don't really remember having a grandmother. Aunt Helen was the closest thing I had to a grandmother figure. I can't really remember a time without her.
Aunt Helen and Uncle Ray lived on a farm in Indiana. At one time, of course, it was a working farm. I can remember animals, especially horses, and a barn with stinky smells. My brother remembers the barn well. He fell from the hayloft (or was pushed by our cousin, it's a family legend and still a he said/he said, mystery) once, and he played in the fields between their house and behind Ray's mother house on the same property.
We had a ritual when we visited. We would enter the house from the backdoor and troop upstairs to the kitchen. The only time I remember using, let alone remember seeing, the front door was the time a stranger knocked on the door in the middle of the night to use the telephone. The back door was used upon every entry that I remember. We would hug Aunt Helen and Uncle Ray, tell some stories about our road trip while we took turns using the bathroom, and then we would head off to our favorite spots. Mother and Aunt Helen would sit at the kitchen table while Uncle Ray hovered by the stove smoking and listening to their chatter. Rusty and I would go into the second bedroom, the one my cousin grew up in, and we would play.
Aunt Helen had these empty perfume bottles and make up compacts on an antique dresser in the bedroom. I would pretend I was heading out for a party and spray myself with perfume and dust my face with "make-up" while Rusty would tell me to hurry up or we would miss the party. We seemed to have had those male/female roles down pat for that era.
We played hide-n-seek. Our favorite hideout was the hall closet and under the high bed in that back room. She also had a "hidden" closet that was behind the door to the bathroom. It was directly across from the second bedroom where we played, but you couldn't see it unless someone was in the bathroom. When no one was in there, the bathroom door was open and it completely hid the closet door. It was great fun to hide in there, but always scary in the dark and with the thought that maybe we would never get out if the bathroom door got wedged open.
Aunt Helen was a retired Home Economics teacher. She had a sewing area in her bedroom, and she had a box of buttons of all sizes and shapes in that antique dresser in the second bedroom. Rusty and I would spend hours upon hours with those buttons. We invented games with them. We built Barbie furniture and house with them. We hid them. We used them for pretend food. We made up a "fish" game with them and tried to match them for points. I loved those damn buttons, and made sure to introduce them to my own children as soon as they were old enough to play with them.
Aunt Helen would have been cooking all morning. She usually had cookies for us, and during the holidays, a persimmon pudding. We'd eat in the kitchen at the table that was pushed up against a window that overlooked the fields. We ate there for breakfast and lunch, but dinner was always at the dining room table on the other side of the kitchen. Helen would scurry around the kitchen filling plates, getting drinks. She didn't have a dishwasher or a garbage disposal. She washed her dishes by hand and burned her trash in a big barrel along side her house. It was a novelty for us, and we begged to be able to wash dishes because it was so much fun...when we were little that is.
She had colored glassware with yellow leaves and oranges in all different sizes. Rusty and I loved using the tiny juice glasses, another novelty. I can still hear now the sound the latches on her cabinets made when you pushed the button on the handle to release the catch and it would squeak as it opened.
Later, I would sit with the adults at the kitchen table to tell stories and catch up. It is a family tradition to sit at that table by the window overlooking the farm. There were only four chairs, but depending on who was there, the dining room chairs would make their way around the kitchen table. Aunt Helen always had great stories about people from church, her daughter, her grandchildren, movies she had seen, celebrities stories she had read. She loved to gossip. We could spend hours there sometimes sitting there until it was time for the next meal.
As I got older, my favorite thing to do was to take the back issues of Aunt Helen's
Ladies Home Journal that she kept for me, and I would read them in the front room sitting in the rocking chair. I would always go right away to the "Can This Marriage Be Saved" section of the magazine. I think that was the start of my idea to be a therapist.
Her front room had a blue flowered sofa, or davenport as she called it, and it had a very distinctive smell, a cross between mustiness and perfume. I don't think my aunt or my uncle ever sat on that thing, but I spent many nights sleeping on it during naps and at night as a teenager. There was a blue arm chair that rocked, a matching rug on the floor, two table with lamps, one by the sofa and one by the chair, a china cabinet, and a wooden rocking chair in the room. It was a very small room, but one we found comfortable and familiar. I loved napping on the "davenport" while listening to hum of the voices trickling in from the kitchen. A safe, comfortable feeling to a child.
At night, Uncle Ray would take a covered plate of food to his mother in her house. Grandma Stanley, as she was called, despite not being a relation to my side of the family, lived in a house on the other side of the barn. There was a worn path between Aunt Helen's house to Grandma Stanley's, the field grass trampled down by Uncle Ray's and Aunt Helen's many treks back and forth. Grandma Stanley would sit in front of the big picture window with a view of Aunt Helen's house, and every time I walked that path I tried to be very good as I knew she was watching. It was along the lines of Norman Bates in the
Psycho movie, and it would creep me out when we had to go to her house to say hello. The only part of her house that I ever remember seeing is the kitchen where we entered and the parlor where she sat looking out the window. It wasn't until her death that I saw the rest of the house. She was an older lady, in my eyes, and very formidable and scary to me because I guessed through adult conversation that Aunt Helen was fearful of her. I think that Uncle Ray spent his nights sleeping at her house, although I can also remember waking in the night and hearing him snoring from his bedroom off the front room.
Rusty and I slept on sleeping bags on the rug in the front room at Aunt Helen's. If my cousins were there, we all slept on the rug while my mother slept on the davenport because my cousins parents got the second bedroom. If my cousins weren't there, my mother slept in the bedroom. As I got older, I got the davenport. We would always awake to the smell of frying bacon and coffee. Uncle Ray and Aunt Helen got up early, and Rusty and I would join them in the kitchen in our pajamas and sit at the table while Aunt Helen made us breakfast. Rusty had a weird love of the white break Aunt Helen bought at the grocery, and it was a great joy for him to be able to use the toaster that sat on the table next to the window, making everyone toast. Aunt Helen always bought an extra loaf for when we were there, and another loaf for him to take home with him. We would talk to Aunt Helen about school, our friends, and tell her stories while Ray stood by the stove listening. She was a good listener, and made me feel like the greatest storyteller ever because she made me feel that she lived for my stories. I gained a lot of confidence in that kitchen during those mornings with Aunt Helen.
Aunt Helen was a tiny thing. I towered over her. I don't remember her as a touchy feeling woman, but I never felt a sense of loss in affection. We hugged when we arrived, bending low to put our arms around her skinny frame, and when we left, but I don't remember her as a cuddler. We use to joke that she would blow away in a gust of wind, and we always made sure to surround her like bodyguards when we left the house for various reasons.
Aunt Helen use to take care of me as a child when my parents traveled for my dad's business or for personal reasons. I don't remember this, but there are pictures.She introduced me to brussel sprouts, and apparently I loved them so much that I would drool when they were presented. That was a family legend, and so I pretended I loved brussel sprouts for years just because I liked hearing that story. I didn't dislike those vegetables, but they weren't my first choice, and they had to have vinegar poured over them for me to eat. Aunt Helen was with me when I had febrile convulsions, strep throat, and dental surgery. She nursed me through fevers and upset stomachs. She bathed me in the tub in the small bathroom. She helped me earn a decent grade in my own Home Economics class in eighth grade sewing a jumpsuit. I vaguely remember her still teaching as a child, but mostly I knew her as a retired sewing teacher.
She would take us outside in the mornings after breakfast to feed the scraps to the many cats that lingered around the back door. We'd help her water all of her plants in the spring, and help her clear pathways through the snow in the winter. The only time I remember seeing her far from the house, except when we went into town, was as an adult finding her in the garden behind Grandma Stanley's house hoeing and picking vegetables. Otherwise, she was a homebody that welcomed our visits.
After my uncle died, Aunt Helen stayed at the house by herself. She loved Indian University basketball games, and once, after coming home and falling on the ice trying to get into her front door, she crawled inside the house with broken bones, and laid on the floor for a day or so until she dragged her body to where she could pull on the telephone cord and call for help. When the paramedics got there to help her, the first question she asked was, "Did Indiana win their game?" She loved Bobby Knight, and IU basketball, and that story is another family legend.
Aunt Helen wrote in little shaky handwriting that I can recognize to this day. She always remembered our birthdays and always wrote some news inside our cards. She began spending Christmas with us long before Uncle Ray died, but yearly after he did.
The last time we saw her was before Christmas after the broken hip. She was in a rehab center working on getting back up on her feet. There was a whole crew of us visiting, including my girls. She looked frail, but her disposition was typical Helen. She wanted news and gossip about all of us. We hated to leave her there when we left. Christmas won't be the same.
I'll miss you Aunt Helen. Thanks for filling in the grandparent spot in my life.
