I light a candle in thanksgiving for my Aunt Paulett, my father’s sister, who died this past Wednesday, January 12, at 10:55 a.m.
Aunt Paulett was my surrogate mother. She knew it early on, I think, when she saw how difficult our mother was—lovely, witty, clever, sharp-tongued Mother, who had a temper to reckon with and an intolerance for anything less than perfection. Aunt Paulett tried to keep herself and her children in our lives, for balance, I think, for an alternative idea of love and acceptance. Which is not to say that Aunt Paulett just accepted whatever choices I made; she did not. She always tried to give guidance, though, without shame or guilt-tripping, and never with the threat of withdrawing her love.
When I think only of Aunt Paulett and not just of her role in my life, I think of joy, of someone embracing life, of someone merging with life. She was up for anything (as long as it wasn’t too early in the morning). I loved how she adopted Dad’s nickname for me, Luly, as if it were a caress. But look how I am already back to what she did for me: She pulled me back to the land of the living, several times. She was so quiet over the whole Lawrence period of my life (one of great highs and desperate lows of my life), but I’ll never forget what she said to me when, years later, Kean felt unable to leave work and come to some reunion she was having up north: “Oh, Lucy, you have gone from one form of rigidity to another!” She was so, so right, but the great thing was that with her love and information, and the love of other family and friends, I was able to transform that “another rigidity” to something slightly more flexible that I could live with.
I have been told all my life, “You are just like your Aunt Paulett.” I was often dramatic, it took a long time for my feet to touch the earth, I loved to sing, I had a body shape like hers (although I let mine go, and she never did), and I was open to the world. Well, thank you, is all I could say; thank you, and I wish I were. And though I could tell that it made my commentators anxious whenever they said it—mainly, I suspect, because I wasn’t more like them—I could also tell that they envied those Aunt Paulett-ish qualities in me.
We have all just lost a powerful force on this earth: a force that knew love like few others, even though we all try; a force that knew duty and passed that on to her daughters; a force that knew determination and worked hard to reveal its lessons to everyone whose life she touched; a force that knew courage and was unashamed and unafraid to help us all into that wagon; a force that knew life and taught us all she could with a passion unrivaled.
I miss you, Aunt Paulett.
Into paradise may
the angels lead you.
At your coming may
the choirs of angels
welcome you,
and may you have peace everlasting.
—Extracts, Antiphon from traditional Latin liturgy of the Western Church Requiem Mass