I wake with a start and realize that the window I shoved open in some perimenopausal spiral is still ajar. Any other April morning this might be acceptable, but a late cold front has hit New York, and I can feel the brutal chill in the air on the extremities that have escaped my quilt. It’s not the low temperatures that have awoken me, and it’s not even the interrupted sleep that I tend to experience more frequently as of late. It’s something else. It’s this thing that I can feel deep in my achy joints and middle-aged bones. It’s a squeeze around my heart and a tightening in my throat.
I know, before I know.
I swing my legs out from under the coverlet and press my flat feet into the floor, toes instantly curling around the soft acrylic nubs of my ocean-colored area rug. Pulling on the sweatpants I draped over the trunk at the foot of the bed, I make my way to the kitchen, bleary eyed. There’s day old coffee in the pot on the counter and I pour it into the mug Neva made me with my right hand as I scroll with my left. Finding my destination, I press the small camera icon and Dad’s face fills the screen.
Doug has a serious resting face, but there is something more there. A variation on somber. Plus, he’s picked up Mom’s Facetime, which, while not unheard of, does mean she’s occupied. Given the early hour, it’s Neva or that other thing. The thing I feel brewing in my deepest core.
What’s going on? I ask.
Good morning, I say, in an effort to correct the bluntness of my greeting.
He doesn’t have to say it, because I know. I already know. My strands of DNA have been in a jostle since that moment just before my eyes fluttered open.
She’s gone. Sandra is gone.
She decided she was done yesterday and today, she left us.
And I know. I know that she made the choice for herself. I know that she lived on this planet over eight decades. I know that she suffered, but also, that she found love. That she loved and was loved fiercely in return. I know all of this and yet, the pain is acute.
As with Ellen, I pause to contemplate. To catalog.
I desperately want to remember all the things.
There is no grand illusion where I am concerned. We lost touch for a span of time. That is the journey with a complicated woman. That is the brambly path that is walking beside the complicated women of my family.
Big dreams.
Big love.
Big grief.
Big passions.
Big delusions.
Big expectations.
Big grudges.
Big talents.
Big words.
Big silences.
I was young at the time of the perceived transgression. And still, it was a learning experience for me. A moment to understand that sometimes, there is nothing that we can do except accept a thing. Sometimes that acceptance doesn’t come with an understanding, but a forced reconciliation. A peace that you form from the tattered bits of awareness and respect, and nothing more.
But then, a restart. And that reunion brought with it an erasure of the past, of the trouble, of the disconnect. It didn’t matter, we decided. We had moved on and time lost was to be a construct and nothing more.
So, the mangy bits, the rough parts, are part of the story, but have been made smaller. Teeny, really. They are unimportant. It’s better to remember the good slices.
Coney Island.
Chats about boys and then, men.
Discount beauty stores and their overfilled shelves.
Steaming hot Chinese food washed down with endless small cups of over sugared tea.
Jewelry try-on sessions.
Lamenting the state of the world- the obtuse grandiosity that comes with power.
Pedicures.
Everything bagels.
So. Many. Books.
The perfect pillows from Home Goods.
Her cackling laugh.
The loss of her child.
The loss of her husbands.
The loss of her siblings.
The loss of her nieces.
So. Much. Loss.
The staggering awareness that there existed a thought of your potential, of who you should be, and anything short was not enough. In the worst way, and also, the best.
My great-aunt. My babysitter. My confidant. My heartbreak.
I press into folds of my heart her long, elegant fingers, and the papery feel of her cheeks.
I embrace the parts of me that are stubborn and loving and wanting and sensitive and disappointed and joyful.
I celebrate my childhood of loving her and our renewed commitment to a relationship and the knowledge that the time we shared was not borrowed, but earned, and that’s a whole different kind of thing.
Sandra Dubler Rand Melmed was glorious and impossible and filled spaces that will now be left empty with this loss.
And yet, she leaves behind a long-forged legacy of complicated women.
Women who always find the words, even when they are too many. Women who feel everything just a little bit deeper than others. Women who want to be something and do something. Women who drive people crazy and love them harder than that. Women who are educated and cultured and magical and terroristic in the way they demand an understanding of others’ love for them. Women who are tough and also, kind. Women who are the best kind of difficult.
I will miss her fiercely, but I feel her every time I paint my own nails, or slice a juicy, ripe tomato, or tear up finishing a book, or lack the self-control to skip buying that blouse. I will feel her whenever I love the wrong people and also, the right ones. I will know she is with me every time I question myself and question the world and wonder what I’ve done wrong and know what I’ve done right. My insides will hum whenever I sip a perfectly made cup of coffee or feel the cool early breeze of a summer morning on my skin or watch a movie that moves me.
It is my fondest wish that all of the complicated women who left before she did have thrown her a welcoming party of sorts. One filled with sweet treats and hugs that are just a beat too long and laughter that’s inexplicable and yet, contagious.
Love you to the moon, Aunt Sandy.
X
L.
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