Heading home

This isn’t an obituary, because she didn’t want one. This isn’t a eulogy, because she didn’t want a funeral either. 

So this is an “until we meet again” letter to my Aunt Dee Dee, who left this experience of a life peacefully last week, just days after her 84th birthday. In my heart she’s headed home.

I don’t want to focus on the sadness of the gap she leaves in my life, but instead on all the ways she filled my world. She had the uncanny ability to pull me out of myself, to be present in every way. She didn’t take herself seriously, or anybody else really, so it was easy to drop any worries and just goof around with someone who saw me as I truly was and loved me anyway. 

As a child, she was the crazy aunt. Her rules were grey. She was unapologetically silly. 

Best babysitter ever.

As an adult, our relationship took a different turn after my sudden illness. My aunt Dee Dee came to support my mom (her younger sister), to help take care of my children, who were three and five at the time. 

I was in a coma for some time and when she would visit, the medical staff told her to talk to me, because even if I couldn’t respond, I could hear her. Well, nobody could prattle on like that woman and I am grateful she did. I know she told me great secrets just to test me later. I think she was glad I didn’t remember a thing. I wish I did, though. I bet those secrets were wild.

I moved Dee Dee to our town a few years later and our bond deepened. She was my co-pilot of countless adventures. The grocery store, or her favourite discount shops, or to share our hairdressing appointments (which she loved). Breakfast out. Drive-through french fries. The little moments were somehow always grand. 

Nobody ever appreciated the value of my time like she did. Driving Miss Dee Dee, I’d say, and she’d smile in her sunglasses, window down, head slightly out the window to feel the wind. The destination was never the goal. The time was never wasted.

I don’t have the space to say it all, but these are some of the highlights I will remember of her. She loved classic horror films, because she liked jump scares. She collected dolls, which made her apartment feel like a horror film. She loved babies and would stop new parents in the grocery store with an infant in their cart and ask what aisle she could get a baby in. She loved donuts, Black Forest cake and anything lemon. She was a cat person. 

She liked her hot dogs burnt on a barbecue. Camping was her idea of a holiday. She believed in ghosts. She loved television commercials. And for decades, you didn’t dare call her between 1pm and 2pm, Monday to Friday, because All My Children was real. 

Her greatest pride in life was her two sons and those they loved. They were everything.

As sad as I am to be without her, I know that nobody will ever love me the way that my Aunt Dee Dee did, and I’m grateful that I was aware of that in the moments we shared. She promised to haunt me (seriously, she did), so I’m looking forward to that. 

Until then, thank you for making life entertaining. 

Get home safe.