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Memories

I’ve been so consumed, even corroded, by my response to my daughter’s death that only today, some 14 months later, did I remember that her paternal Aunt had died a mere three weeks before she did. Irony reveals Top Ramen noodles as the trigger of the memory. Her Aunt introduced me to the little square package of dried noodles the summer she vacationed in Denver as she unpacked it from her luggage. Born in the Great State of Texas (the last frontier as far as I was concerned), she wasn’t sure that Denver, the “Roll up the sidewalks at dusk Cow Town,” would stock it. To be fair to all and put her visit in perspective, my Sister-in-Law first vacationed here in the early 1970s. Anyway.

She was a wonderfully inventive cook and dubbed her first meal “ Ramen Supreme a la Ann.” The noodle dish contained a melange of spices from my pantry (since I was no slouch in the kitchen, either) and butter ( I didn’t do margarine even then), that she topped off with scallions. Lawdy, Lawdy, the dish was sensational! We shared her two weeks vacation cooking up a storm.

While she and I had stopped speaking some 12 years later, a casualty of divorce debris, she and my daughters maintained a relationship that lasted until she died. Another irony is that she and I lived two miles apart and had done so for about 15 years. I would see her maybe once a year in the local grocery store, and actually made it a point to speak, but it was a strained couple of minutes. Occasionally, my Daughter would share snippets of her Aunt’s life: the dissolution of her marriage, death of her former husband, cancer diagnosis and surgeries, and uplifting,post-operative news, including her return to work.

Of course, we had experienced sudden death because my first grandson had succumbed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) which our family subsequently had tucked away after years of pain. My Daughter who died had suffered horribly from his death because he was the first “Grand” in our family to die from SIDS and she was his Godmother. I’m not sure she ever fully recovered from mourning her loss.

Imagine our shock and dismay when she received the call that Saturday morning as she, her sister, and I were on the way home from an early morning errand! Ironically, again, we were no more than a mile from their Aunt’s home and detoured directly there. My Daughter vowed that she would be available “24-7” for her two cousins, not just for this portion of the journey, but “forever!.” Her Aunt’s oldest daughter, who lived in Texas, was in Denver because she just had had a “feeling” the Friday before that her Mom, who had just survived a second surgery, needed her.

The older daughter had been preparing to pick her Mom up from the hospital when she got the call. I had not seen this niece, now in her 40s, since she was around 13 or 14. There she stood in the living room of her childhood home cloaked in total shock, denial, and unutterable loss. Physically, she looked the same; I’d recognize her anywhere. Yet, in indescribable ways, she looked different: shoulders shrunken into herself so distinctly that she appeared shorter, although she was still “Texas Tall.”

She cied-chanted “Mama! Mama! Mama!” in a voice so forlorn that it echoed as a chorus, as her cousins took turns trying to soothe her and to be soothed. I had been praying silently since we got the news. Now I vocalized an Intercessory prayer to Our Father for her because I sensed she need out-loud acknowledgment of her loss and authoritative reassurance that the angels assigned her Mom at birth, had simply opened the door to her hospital room and escorted her back to her Father’s arms, where she now basks in the beauty of His inestimable, unchanging Love.