My Aunt Laurette
I’ve learned this morning that my Aunt Laurette has died at age 94. That’s a long life, to be sure, especially if the last of it was fraught with the terror of Alzheimer’s disease, which begins to seem the curse of that generation of my family. You can’t help but feel that this last step was a relief for her, although it leaves a saddened family.
And it leaves me sad, too, because I have rarely met a woman like her. We lived nearby for much of my early childhood and she was one of the markers of my early life. I learned a good bit about bearing up and going on from her, but she did it with the kindest of smiles for everyone.
Aunt Laurette was married to my Uncle Richard, who physically resembled my father, his younger brother. They had twelve children. They sat down fourteen at table when they were alone, but often there were others invited and the enormous kitchen rang with noisy people and a busyness that resembled an anthill. Each older child seemed to have the care of a younger one. Food came off the cooker and onto the table in quantities that were unimaginable to me at the time. Everyone had a chore and did it. If it hadn’t been that way, life could have been a shambles in a moment.
And there was love. I can remember watching the older girls make hairdos for the tiny twins– not at the table, of course. I remember thinking that I could see and feel the love they had for the twins in what they did for them. It shone also in what they did for others. Tina, the daughter one year older than me, was assigned to take me to school my first day. It took all the scary out of it for me. I did not do as good a job when it was my turn to take my little sister, who was miserable and wet her pants on the front step because she didn’t know where the toilets were. I also never braided her hair.
Uncle Richard died very young from a heart attack, leaving Aunt Laurette with a baby in her arms. She and her kids kept their farm going while she returned to work, although I can never remember a time she didn’t work as hard as anyone I ever saw. They had a dairy farm and her hands and wrists were often cracked and scarred by the washing compounds used for the glass bottles milk came in in those days. Did she ever rest? I’m not sure. I never saw her just sit until she was a very old lady and surrounded by kids and grandkids, decades later.
If any of this sounds grim, it really wasn’t. I think Aunt Laurette took all this on as her particular place in the world. Hard work happened. She did it. Tragedies came along and she survived them. Her kids grew up and took over, one thought happily, the burden of running things, extending the arms of care and eventually they built her a modern home exactly where the shambling and enormous old one had been. She was so proud of that, as she was right to be, because they’d all learned their lessons well. They turned into interesting people who did various things and didn’t resemble each other much, except for the caring attitude I always felt from them. They are a most attractive group of people and I am proud to be connected to them, although they are all far away and in different worlds from me. Of the eleven surviving children, they seem as individual as if they came from different families, other than this common trait of being lively and connected to those they meet. And that, I believe, is her memorial, that in the necessarily chaotic life of fourteen people under one roof and a family business to run, she reared individuals. To me, that makes her a hero.
It is usual to say rest in peace, and I know there will be peace, but I have a hard time imagining Aunt Laurette resting. There will surely be many things that need to be organized in heaven and she’ll take care of them, too.
Read about this wonderful woman in her local paper.
7 comments November 5th, 2007
