During the Paris trip I let my son make all the major decisions about our activities in tribute to his birthday, and he elected to go to Disneyland for a day.
Of course we started in Fantasyland, with Dumbo, followed by Peter Pan and onward through all the other attractions. As we flew through a simulated nightime London sky I reckoned my mother would be proud; in her lexicon, there is no greater treat than the Magic Kingdom.
Then I remembered the last time I’d been on the ride, or zipping through the Haunted Mansion, or leaning against the rail on the Mark Twain steamboat attraction, or marveling at the genius of Small World, my aunt was next to me.
Today is traditionally All Soul’s, the Day of the Dead, Commemoration of all the Faithful Departed, Defuncts Day, depending on what you believe and where you grew up. I was not raised with the tradition, but do agree that these few days of the year are a transition – the bridge between autumn and winter – and as such have an eerie appeal.
My family is not religious. Even when they thought I was dying, there was no recourse to prayer, no solace in dreams of an afterlife. We are stoic atheists brought up to understand, collectively, that life is what you make it. The past and the future are at best a story left untold, and nostalgia is the most dangerous feeling in the world.
Of course my grandmother also talked to ghosts and had an eerie prescient knowledge of our whereabouts, particularly when we were in peril. This was not a great comfort as she watched brothers and three of her children die young.
My aunt, like too many others in the maternal family line, did not live to see her fiftieth birthday. I think about her every day, and I am angry, and sad, though never confused. I could say that I miss her, but I’ve been missing her since the day in 1979 she walked away from her home.
It was her choice to die, nearly thirty years after she broke our hearts for the first but not last time.
Of all the many choices in her life, death was one of the most merciful, and definitely the most anticipated. I do not share my grandmothers relationship with the spirit world (even if many people refer to me as creepy), but my aunt is haunting me: literally.
On the day of her funeral my shaking hands were covered with ashes when I stabbed my ringing mobile silent, and the gray matter seeped into the mechanism. Now my numbers, alarm, and music are prone to erratic changes and failures. How like my aunt – and how perfect.
She possessed a ferocious intellect, scorching wit, fantastical imagination, and scathing sense of humor. When I refer to her as my Dead Junkie Auntie I do so with the suspicion that she would approve – the description is accurate, but also funny, and in my family that absolves almost any trespass.
If we’re not formed by our experiences, we are at least shaped by what we encounter. I grew up in a family that loved and protected miscreants of all descriptions, and I learned from them not tolerance (oh no) but rather sheer delight in the chaotic excesses offered by the world.
Murderers, liars, thieves? So long as they are amusing, they’re all invited to the party. My ability to wander so far from home with such huge enjoyment is contingent on a vast curiosity instilled by people who never moved more than ten miles from the homestead, people who did not even elect to stay alive.
They never submitted to false authority, never let anyone rule their lives, brains, hearts. They pushed hard against all boundaries, and they gave me those skills, along with direct orders to get out and fling myself at something new.
Beyond that my aunt gave me a very specific gift, and I should have thanked her when I had the chance. All those dinners with her nodding off in front of the Christmas tree; the times I picked her up from jail, or psych units, or emergency rooms; helping raise her semi-abandoned baby son through a fraught childhood; watching my esteemed grandmother suffer – I was paying attention.
My aunt is the sole reason I have never, under any circumstances, willingly used drugs. Not socially, or in the hospital, or after surgery, or after the accident, not even when I thought I would die.