I've had an eventful time. Well, eventful for me! I went through my great aunts things-- some of them anyway.
I now have a nice old clock (which i cant hang yet) a kitchen witch, a hundred year old gold bowl that she brought with her from sweden, a very lovely painted slavic-style tile, and many, many recipe cards. including handwritten ones, as my great aunt was very fond of cooking.
A random task ill set myself to is collecting her recipes together into some sort of book, before the ink is too faded on the pages to be read. Some of it already is hard to decipher (though she does have some interesting handwriting lol)
I think im just feeling a little empty because of it all, yknow. I went to the farm to look at her things, and to see the entirety of her possessions confined to four pallets was very odd to say the least. Some of her things were packed in matzoh meal boxes, which i at least found a bit amusing.
It's just a lot to go through. I've talked about it a few times before but I genuinely think a lot of people just don't understand how much she meant to me. The cookbook i sent her as a child is back in my hands now-- just on the inside is a note I had written with an untrained hand. I had wished her a very yummy year.
I just miss her a lot. She was supposed to be here. She was two weeks from moving to Georgia, so she could spend her last years with us. But she got sick with Covid, and died in two days. just two. I barely had time to say goodbye. I didn't even get to talk to her. I still have a tape with her voice on it, but its different, you know?
I'm just feeling nostalgic recently I think. When she first died, I was just crushed. At that point I'd already lost another aunt on my birthday (also to covid) and here was the woman I admired most, gone before I could even hear her voice again. I hadn't hugged her in five years. I went to my parents house and stared at the woods for a very long time, just sitting in the january cold and trying to understand the unfairness of it all.
I hated it so much. I hated knowing I couldnt talk to her, that I couldn't bake with her. That I couldn't hear her stories again. I feel like I missed something-- but it was more that it was taken away by something preventable. I was angry about it, I still kind of am, but as it stands all I can think of is those holiday parties we'd have as kids, running around my great aunt Brenda's small house (she's the one who passed on my birthday in 2021), or in my great grandmother barbaras home, just dying to talk to her whenever i got the chance.
I'm not sure what I'd do differently if I was there again. Hug her I guess. Talk to her more, remind her how much I loved her. I wish she hadn't died. I want to bake with her, I want to ask her who the people in her pictures are, the ones even my own grandmother can't name.
It's hard. this is really rambly too, but I sort of get like that when I'm thinking about death. I don't believe in an afterlife or anything like that, but I hope wherever she might find herself, that she's at peace. She deserves that.
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