Life...

I learned yesterday that one of my great aunts passed away. She was 89. I spent very little time with her... and know her only through stories and photos posted on a family website that we have. Her pictures reminded me of her brother, my grandfather, for whom I had great affection, admiration, and of course love. So I associate her with my memories of him... perhaps projecting many of her qualities onto her. Like any family, ours has medical issues that we need to be aware of...One of the things we have is aneurysms. My aunt died, as did my grandfather, from an aneurysm. Just recently my aunt had decided to forgo a surgery that could have perhaps removed the aneurysm because she felt like she was able to live the kind of life she wanted to live, that a surgery, at her age, would be so hard to recover from and knew that she may have never get back to the point of health where she was without the surgery... and she was feeling good and wanted to continue to feel good... for as long as she could. I admire that. A lot. I am sure that choice was hard for her and for her family... but she lived her life on her terms... and I love that. It's beautiful. Her death does make me sad... not because of my personal connection with her, but because that generation of people in my family is disappearing... and what a generation it is. As that generation disappears many of our traditions are also disappearing... the art of storytelling, cooking from scratch, sewing, family values, time, appreciation of each other... it also is a moment where you realize that inevitably you are going to lose other people too... While I didn't know my Aunt Dot... I hope I am like her in ways... at least in the ways I perceived her to be...