First Life

My cousin Christine called me today to tell me my Auntie Betty died on Friday. She'd had an aortic aneurysm on Thursday while she and Uncle Tony were on a bus. She was taken by ambulance to a hospital, and they asked Uncle Tony if they should attempt to save her life. He was shocked and said yes. She survived the oporation and on Friday Uncle Tony, Christopher (their son), Christine (their niece), and Devinda (Christine's husband) were with her. Christine told her who was there and asked her to blink if she understood. Auntie Betty blinked. Then, soon after, she died. Auntie Betty was 87 and in the early stages of Alzheimer's - she was my father's older sister, and he died of Alzheimer's. Apparently their mother died of an aortic aneurysm - something I never knew. In this case it probably spared her the degradation of Alzheimer's disease. She will be cremated and her ashes taken back to England to be put next to the grave of Jeremy, their eldest son, who died when he was just 5 or 6, of a combination of... whooping cough and something else. Measles, perhaps. Well, I'm not sure. It was in the early Fifties.Auntie Betty was, as a young woman, into modern dance. Later, she seemed to survive on cigarettes and novels. I was very close to the family when I was a child - they were our most nearby relatives (at one point even in the same country) and Christopher is only about a year older than I. We were obsessed with science as children and we visited once a year or so - once I remember my father taking us to a scientific supply place to buy test tubes and slides and bunsen burners. The little glass slide covers came in a tiny brown box about an inch in each direction, surprisingly heavy, and full of a stack of thin glass squares.

It was a bad thing when my family blew up, years ago.

Where's my handkerchief...