My favorite aunt died last night.
That would have meant more ten years or so ago, when I had about a dozen aunts to choose among, all of whom I was fond of but one of whom was infinitely, ineffably, indescribably special to me. But as I approach my fifth decade, my parents’ generation has been dwindling, and twelve became eleven, then ten, then nine. Yesterday morning it was three. Last night I lost the one who was always my favorite.
But I don’t want to write about me right now. I want to write about GiGi. And that’s hard, because there are endless wonderful things to say about her. Though she is…was…in her early seventies, she never really retired from her job as a schoolteacher; not because she needed the money (she had tons of it, being a very shrewd investor) but because she simply liked it. So after she got out of the daily grind of elementary school, she kept on working as a substitute, or at community colleges, or anything that would keep her involved with children. I was never her student, and I never sat in on any of her classes, but I cannot help but think she was a wonderful teacher, because her own love of learning was unmistakeable: almost palpable. When I was in college, she always insisted that I teach her things that I was learning myself. She had no practical use knowledge of diffy q or deconstructionism or the Crusades; but to her knowledge didn’t have to be practical to be valuable. To Gigi knowledge was a thing of beauty.
We used to make jokes about all Gigi’s names. She had been married several times, you see, and each time she re-married, she tacked the new name onto all the old ones, so she was Gigi Elizabeth Harris Rhymer Fabulous, etc. Her first marriage was the only one that produced children–two of them, a boy and a girl–who spent as much time in my parents house as in their mother’s when we were young. Those cousins have always been more like siblings to me, just as their mother was my emergency backup mother.
Gigi taught me about the true nature of beauty. Unlike her sisters, she was never a looker, not in the superficial sense; but somehow that never mattered. Her vivacity, her wit, her humor, her confidence in her own self-worth made her a wonder to behold. Five minutes after meeting her, you’d forget all about the enormous nose and the subtle asymmetries of her face, because her charm and enthusiasm for whatever you were talking about had driven such crass thoughts out of your mind. And once you heard her sing – and she was always *singing * – you’d suspect you in the presence of a vacationing angel, and resolve to get your eyes checked, because clearly you had been seeing things when you thoguht she was homely.
As I said, she was my emergency backup mother. When my actual biological mother died in 2006, it was Gigi who brought me the most comfort, Gigi’s arms in which I could cry. It is my great and now useless great that I never adequately thanked her for comfort, for all the thousands of ways she made that time easier for me and my brothers and sisters.
I opened this post with a cleaned-up version of what I said when I heard about Gigi’s death. In fact I said “Fuck you, death. Fuck you and your fucking pale horse.” That’s what I’m still feeling, to tell you the truth, but I refuse to end the post that way. Instead I’ll write this:
I love you, Gigi.
