If Only This Could Be Said

Remembering My Aunt Part 3.....I Look at You

 RETURNING HOME


    I want to tell you a
    gentlest thing. Like light
    to you. Like old faces
    being fed a good memory
    from inside themselves.
    Like eyes that do not
    watch but slowly meet
    across a room in which
    everyone is, and no one
    need hurry to what he is
    sure of. I want to say
    before we run out of
    rooms and everyone
    that I am slowest,
    surest, gentlest, too,
    across whatever room
    I look at you.

 

Remembering my Aunt Part 2

 

Until today I have never seen a picture of my Aunt holding baby Jody.  I didn't think any existed.  Jody was very sick as a baby and I thought pictures were the last thing on their mind.

TODAY a pile of these pictures literally fell into my lap while going through some boxes and papers.

Stories go on and on.

Today I also found out for the first time in my life that my aunt's husband had been a prisoner of war in a German POW camp in 1944-45.  Another thing that 'fell' into my lap today.  There is even a picture of him in the striped clothing behind barbed wire.

I am left with abosolutely NOT A SINGLE relative left alive from that generation to tell me why I did not know this, why it wasn't even mentioned.  

 

Remembering My Aunt "Janie" , One Hard Headed Women

My dear aunt Elizabeth Jane died this morning. She was born in 1929; not a good year for the US, but a good year for for the world because of her love, grace, dignity and overwhelming strength in the most difficult of circumstances. 

Her only child, Jody, who has Down's Syndrome lives up North. Jody was born on MY Birthday, but a year earlier; I guess that means I was born on Jody's first birthday. Like a sign I was to kind of watch over her. Like my twin brothers, I always had a double birthday since we celebrated all birthdays together until we became adults and I grew up and she didn't.

The 50s and 60s were not an easy time to have a mentally challenged child. Back then she was always referred to as 'retarded'. It was the official term and everyone used it. Against the recommendation of doctors, friends and even family my aunt refused to put her daughter in an institution (she also was born with a cleft palate and couldn't feed normally-my aunt kept her alive by sheer willpower. Then the doctors told her Jody would not live to be an adult and also wouldn't be able to do anything for herself and was not 'educable'. Jody will be 56 this year. She graduated from high school. She can read and write, loves music and singing and just by being in our lives made us better, more compassionate people. 

My aunt would not be what I would call a feminist. She was raised to be quite traditional; but it was watching her fight for her daughter; fight for a life of her own; ignoring remarks about her 'kookiness'-that's what they called women who were born artists and pursue the creative arts by hook or by crook.

I still will have her beautiful drawings and paintings AND my memories to remind me of this very gutsy women born during a time when gutsy women were put down socially, verbally, and even at times physically.

Always Our Brother's Keeper

If there is no God,
Not everything is permitted to man.
He is still his brother’s keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother,
By saying that there is no God.

Czeslaw Milosz

Photo:Thematic And Dramatic Self-Portraiture By Noell S. Oszvald