Time With Family

It’s about 8:15 pm Phoenix time. I’m sitting in the Phoenix airport writing on this computer like the big boys all intense and focused sitting over there by the window with Camelback mountain glowing orange in the sunset, in their oh so perfectly sloppy jeans and tee shirts. I have been traveling what seems like a long time mostly because of time change issues. My biological time is really 11:15 pm and I’m pretty darn tired, but I’ve got a final leg to go to get to San Diego – and the plane is delayed.

I’m visiting my aunt, my father’s sister, the last remaining adult in my family blood line. She is ill and needs family. The irony is that I’m adopted, but that’s forgotten in these tense times of illness and unhappiness.

I resisted this trip, but my children and my aunt’s friends all but put me on the plane. It will probably be the last time I will see her alive. But maybe she will be like my father in law who hung on four years after the doctors told his wife he would be dead in five months.

I thought it odd that I so didn’t want to come out here. I had concerns about my husband, and of course Pepper, and then there is the raw food thing I’m into…what was I going to eat? But really it boiled down to not wanting to acknowledge that once my aunt moves on, I will have no one to tell me family stories about when I was a kid. No one to ask questions like, “ Now that I’m ready to listen, is there anything special you’d like to pass on?” or “Why do you have so many lace handkerchiefs?” (My mom had a closet full of them, and I never asked her why.) Maybe I would ask, “Why did you marry dad?” and “Why do I have to call all your friends Aunt or Uncle?” At one point in my young life, I had so many aunts and uncles I couldn't keep them untangled in my mind.

The truth is I have only one real Aunt, the one I’m going to see, the last one to tell me family stories and maybe give me some answers.