Lair of the Lost Girl

RIP Barbara Collier.

My great-aunt has died. I'm not sure whether it happened last night or this morning; I didn't think to ask. I got the phone call from my mother this morning, as part of the family phone tree - we're getting pretty good at this.

It wasn't unexpected. Like I mentioned earlier this week, she had a stroke a while ago and has been functionally gone for the past year and a half; at the family reunion last weekend the decision was made to stop her life support. Honestly, deep down in my heart of hearts, I'm glad for her that she's passed. The way she was... that wasn't any way to live, especially not for a woman as vibrant and energetic and no-nonsense as she was - one of my favorite memories of her was at her 90th birthday party, where I didn't get much of a chance to talk with her because she was too busy dancing and flirting with her new boyfriend.

I'm running out of things to say, in posts like this. I remember her. I love her. She never had children of her own, so in each generation she'd pick one of the nieces and make them her special kid. First it was my mother, then me. Each summer I'd spend a month at her house in Maine, and she'd take me to the beach and to her farm and let me read her yellowed old books and give me the time and attention that parents can't always give a kid. Her first husband was a dairy farmer; he died when I was about ten-ish. She remarried a few years later, and it took me a while to forgive her for that - it meant that she sold the farm and moved away from the house that I had always secretly thought of as my real home, and that I had to share her with some old guy who had liver spots and a funny voice, but I eventually came to love Uncle Francis, too, mostly because she did.

I want to be like her. There are so many other things I could say here, but that's the only one, I think, that matters.

And I feel like a horrible person because I think I'm not going to her funeral. It falls on a day that I'm not working, but.... I have been too much surrounded by death this year. I love her, and I love my family, but I don't know if driving to Kennebunk to spend a day surrounded by distant aunts and cousins, wallowing in our shared grief, is going to do anything other than make me even more miserable. I know I should, I know that it's important to fly the family color, but what I want, and what I need, is to be around people who love me *AND* know me, to be outside, to walk and breathe and spend time in my own head, not being the Good Daughter and the Good Niece and holding up everyone else's sorrow.

I love you, Auntie Barbara, and I miss you, and thank you.

And please, God, let this be the last one for a little while?

Please?

I did not need this now.

I just got word from my mother that my dad is being treated for lymphoma, and that it's... not going well.

Those of you who know me well enough to know my history with my father will know that this is a complicated, messy, miserable situation - beyond the obvious trauma of a parent being treated for cancer, he and I have a lot of baggage in our relationship.

I am a big bag of jagged little pieces right now. I don't know how much more I can take.