I'll Be Waving Forever

People we don't know how to lose

There are certain people who love you exactly as you are. In my experience, there aren’t a lot of them, not if we’re talking about people who love you without expectation or demand, without any need for you to be a certain way, or to hide your messy feelings. I’m talking about people who love you unconditionally, whose eyes light up every time they see you, even if it hasn’t been that long since the last time they saw you.

When they speak, you can feel the love pouring through their voice, and if you’re three thousand miles away, it doesn’t matter because sound waves carry their love, through the air, up to the satellite and down to your phone, or however it works - and those love particles go through your ear canal and settle into and around your heart. They keep you safe. It’s science.

I don’t really know if I can write this because I am hurting so much right now, even though I understand this is the way of things. People we love with our entire hearts do not last here on this planet forever. Hopefully when they go, they become stardust, they light up the night sky, and when we look up at the stars, they wink at us. When we’re doing the dishes or driving somewhere, maybe they settle into the ether around us, hoping we can feel them.

I’ve felt my Nanny (my mother’s mother) with me since the day she died when I was almost four, and since my mom died almost four years ago, I feel her with me, too. Still, it’s not the same. It’s hard not to be attached to a person’s voice, or the idea that you could get on a plane and show up at their house and hug them. Laugh with them.

The last time I saw my Aunt Louise was in May. She was standing in the doorway of her house - the same house where I bounced down the carpeted stairs to the rec room as a kid - waving to me the way she always did when I left. She had tears in her eyes and I did, too - not because I thought it was the last time I was going to see her, but because we always cried a little when we said goodbye. She was as bad at goodbyes as I am, or maybe she was as good at them.

I turned around and waved to her fifteen times on my way to the car I’d rented. It was about 30 feet from her front door, so you can do the math. It was raining a little, but I didn’t open the umbrella because I didn’t care. I can still see her face, smiling at me as she waved her little hand, misty raindrops on my eyelashes and also some tears. It’s incredible to be loved like that, and to love like that. It’s the best. Side note, my Nanny’s favorite song was Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.

My Aunt Louise was married to my mother’s brother. They had (have) four kids, my cousins, two boys, two girls, all 6,8,10,12 years older than I am. When I was little, before my parents got divorced, we all used to spend the summers at my grandmother’s house (my Nanny) at the Jersey Shore. My uncle was eleven years older than my mother, and protective of her, and of me. He was protective of his wife and kids, too, he was that kind of man. Once when I was three I got pulled into the ocean and the current took me. I couldn’t figure out which way was up, and I wouldn’t have been able to swim for it, anyway. Suddenly, my uncle’s huge arms plucked me out of the ocean like Poseidon. That’s how he was.

When my grandmother died and then my dad left us a week later, my uncle was quiet about it. Later, when I was a little older I could tell he did not think a good man would leave his young wife and small daughter at all, let alone the week after a loss like that. I don’t think my mother ever fully recovered.

I started spending the time I used to spend with my grandmother, with my Aunt Louise and uncle and my four cousins. Before my Nanny died, my mom and I would see her almost every day. She’d come to the city or we’d go to her - she and my mom were very close. My Aunt Louise was cut from the same cloth as my Nanny - she was affectionate, loving, effusive, quick to throw her head back and laugh. She would gather me up in her arms, put me on her lap, squeeze me and call me her Ally Oop - a thing she did my entire life, even the last time I saw her, and also every time we spoke on the phone, which was often.

The ache I feel knowing I won’t ever hear her say that again makes it hard to breathe.

First two are after a book event I did in NYC in 2016, second two are over the last few years.

Once when I was about seven and sleeping over at their house for the weekend, I went downstairs for water. I froze at the edge of the formal living room (where the sofas were covered in plastic because this was the seventies). My aunt and uncle were in the bathroom together, a thing I found scandalous since my mother never allowed anyone in the bathroom with her, not even me. I heard him telling her how serious I’d become. She agreed with him and said she wished I could just stay with them all the time. Instead, she did everything she could to make the time I spent there the best.

She always stopped at the bakery to get me black-and-white cookies, my favorite at the time. She’d make pasta and pancakes and anything else I wanted all weekend. She had a cookie drawer in the kitchen with every kind of cookie. It’s still there, I checked in May. Her grandkids are my cousins’ babies, and I love them all. Two of them have been on a bunch of yoga retreats with me. Now there are great grandkids. Someone else will have to create a cookie drawer for them. Maybe it will be me.

She’d read me books and ask me questions about school, about my friends, about how I felt going back and forth between two homes. She never pried, but I knew I was safe with her. She’d laugh about how I could possibly know the words to every song on the radio, she’d oooo and ahhhh about my drawings. She’d let me sit at the edge of the kitchen floor with the family dog Mitzi - a poodle I thought was huge until I saw pictures not too long ago - while she hand-washed the linoleum at the end of the day with a soapy bucket of water and a sponge. Then she’d wipe it with a rag. She made big circles on the floor while we talked. Mitzi always had a manicure.

My uncle died suddenly of a heart attack when he was in his fifties, the day before he was supposed to get on a plane to meet my aunt for the first solo vacation they were taking now that all the kids were out of the house. He was going to meet her at the end of a business trip she was on in California.

I’ll never forget the sound of my mother crying out when the phone rang. I was seventeen at the time. She yelled for me to pick up the line and it was my cousin, crying. It was gutting and impossible and one of the only times I saw my mother break down. My cousin flew to California to tell my aunt in person, and to fly home with her. She was fifty-three at the time, younger by a year than I am now. She never dated anyone again, he was it for her.

We talked about it once, she said she tried dating a couple of times, just dinners out because she did feel lonely, but she just couldn’t do it. She had girlfriends, she liked to travel, she started doing yoga. She asked me a million questions about it, she really loved it.

She was devoted to her children, to her grandchildren and to her great grandchildren. She had (has) an identical twin sister and they were always close. When I was little, I couldn’t tell them apart and It made me anxious because I felt like I should know my Aunt Louise anywhere. Sometimes her sister would come over in the exact same outfit even though they hadn’t talked about it, and then I was really sunk.

She always said I was like her fifth child, and I can only hope she knew how much that meant to me. I felt displaced growing up for so many reasons, but when I was with her, it felt like home. When my mother was first rushed to the ICU, my Aunt Louise came that very day. She grabbed me, looked me in the eyes and hugged me, hard. She did not tell me it was going to be okay. We all knew it wasn’t going to be okay.

My mother was hooked up to a ventilator that first day, there were wires and machines going everywhere, and I was scared. I’d been holding her hand and talking to her, and she was squeezing my hand in response. I was trying not to show my mom how scared I was. My Aunt Louise marched over to the bed, reached through the wires and held my mother’s face in her hands. I saw how it was done, how I needed to be. I saw a flash of my mom as a little girl - terrified, but comforted by the one person she knew she could trust. Eventually my mom looked at me like that, too, but that’s a story for another time.

I told my Aunt Louise how much I loved her every time I saw her and spoke to her on the phone, and how she saved my life, because she did. It’s a tough thing when your mother has a hard time mothering, whatever the reasons. It makes you wonder if you’re broken or unlovable on some very deep level. I grappled with that a lot as a kid, and as a young adult, and as an adult-adult, but every time I saw my aunt, she loved me with such unwavering intensity and enthusiasm, I’d walk away feeling crazy for doubting it. Which is kind of the best feeling in the world.

I know everything is on fire right now. I’m so tired of the fire and the chaos and cruelty, and I know you are, too. I’m also tired of grieving and tears and feeling despair. I’ve done so much of that the last few years, I’m starting to feel like this is the lesson for me in this chapter. To keep softening and letting my heart break open even though I don’t know how much softer or more open I can get at this point. I’m so freaking sad I’ll never get to hear her voice again.

But I wanted to say something. If you doubt that one person can make a huge difference in someone’s life, maybe stop doubting. If you’re someone’s aunt, or aunt-by-choice, or someone’s grandma or stand-in grandma and you’re helping to mother a child whose own mother struggles in that area, I hope you know how much you matter. There’s no such thing as other people’s children.

I’m so grateful I got to be her niece.

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