This is the first year in memory that did not begin with a general attitude of idealism. Maybe it's just me (recovering idealist) but thinking back over the last decade, there is a contrast.
The new millennium was supposed to be the beginning of great things, right? One generation in hundreds gets to see such a thing, and there we were! Y2K, 9/9/99, the .com bust- it all melted into distant memory with the dawn of the year 2000.
A decade later and the Trade Towers are gone, the War on Terror continues and while the Great Recession is supposed to be over, thousands of thousands are still out of work. 2010, still fresh, has given us cataclysmic catastrophe in Haiti, toppling in seconds what will take years to recover. It's only January.
And in my own family, the beginning of 2010 marked the death of Aunt Kay. Really my great aunt, Kay lived a quiet life in the same city for 89 years, never married and outlived most of her friends. She had no children, but she impacted her nieces and nephews and their nieces and nephews, and so on and so forth, with uncanny force. You would be surprised the impact such a woman can have.
My entire life has been peppered by trips to see Kay in San Francisco, the greatest city of them all, where we walked through Golden Gate Park and ate pink popcorn on the merry-go-round, because that's what members of my family have been doing since Kay was my age. Heck, I think that's what we've been doing since we stepped off the boat.
Kay was a staple, a constant, a given. She always opened her tiny little home near the water and spent time walking through the city with family members who would drop in from all over the place. Everything made her laugh, and I do mean everything. "Isn't that cute!" and "Oh, glory be to Hallelujah!" in the slightest of Irish brogues were her default responses- the former to any sort of story (be it cute or hair raising) and the latter to anything requiring exclamation.
Looking at Kay's lifestyle I'm hopeful she really knew Jesus. She was the most content woman I ever knew, sitting in her tiny apartment, getting a kick out of any trifle someone might send along to say hello, perfectly happy to give generously to anyone who needed it. And for all her cute little Irish ways, she was a fairly bold woman. She spoke her mind simply and without apology, force or defense. She was as genuine as they get. I don't know if she spent any of her thoughts on herself.
This Christmas, I spent the day sicker than I've been in years. When I was able to peel myself off the bathroom floor, I lay on the couch or in bed, miserable. Kay shuffled by the door and poked her head in to ask how I was feeling.
"A little rough," came the response.
"I'm sorry you're not feeling well. I'll pray for you," she said, confidently. Then she waved and cracked her irrepressible grin and shuffled back down the hall with my dad's help.
Oh, the irony. My little aunt, 89 years old, who needed help walking, was praying for me to feel better.
I'm trying to convey a sense of who Kay was, and realize I'm falling painfully short. That's the blessing and curse of knowing somebody- all those glorious pieces that can't be conveyed, only known.
Well, for what it's worth, that was Kay. Constant, genuine, one of the kindest, most gentle souls in the family and fairly difficult to describe in one short volume. Among a cast of vivacious adventurers, Kay was a cheerleader, happy to stay in San Francisco and watch others go everywhere else, cheering them on without a thought that she might be entitled to a little more than a small apartment in the city and a card from the family now and then.
When she got sick this last weekend, we thought it was the same bug that was floating around at Christmas. It might have been, who knows? Whatever it was, it proved too much.
My mom didn't want Kay to die alone, so she and my dad sat with her, holding her hands until she died. And that's the part that tears me to pieces, the thought of Kay drifting out of this world as contentedly as she had lived in it. Such a woman should have been surrounded by the people who loved her, because I want her to have known the true measure of the impact she had. But death came too quickly. With all my heart I praise God she wasn't alone at the end, and part of me wishes very badly I could have seen her off.
When my mom called to tell me Kay had died, I tried putting the impression into words, telling friends it was like a sprawling tree had been cut down, leaving the middle of the forest looking bare. It's not that I was super close to Kay, though she was an incomparable aunt and I'm glad she was mine, but an important piece of the picture is simply gone. Maybe not the focus of a painting, but key to its composition.
No matter how many new years come, death and disaster are our constant companions. Sometimes entire cities topple, sometimes one life at a time. I don't suppose we'd do well if we couldn't measure spans of time, untouched for a moment while we celebrate their newness and the fact that hope, irrepressible, unshakable, always remains.
The new millennium was supposed to be the beginning of great things, right? One generation in hundreds gets to see such a thing, and there we were! Y2K, 9/9/99, the .com bust- it all melted into distant memory with the dawn of the year 2000.
A decade later and the Trade Towers are gone, the War on Terror continues and while the Great Recession is supposed to be over, thousands of thousands are still out of work. 2010, still fresh, has given us cataclysmic catastrophe in Haiti, toppling in seconds what will take years to recover. It's only January.
And in my own family, the beginning of 2010 marked the death of Aunt Kay. Really my great aunt, Kay lived a quiet life in the same city for 89 years, never married and outlived most of her friends. She had no children, but she impacted her nieces and nephews and their nieces and nephews, and so on and so forth, with uncanny force. You would be surprised the impact such a woman can have.
My entire life has been peppered by trips to see Kay in San Francisco, the greatest city of them all, where we walked through Golden Gate Park and ate pink popcorn on the merry-go-round, because that's what members of my family have been doing since Kay was my age. Heck, I think that's what we've been doing since we stepped off the boat.
Kay was a staple, a constant, a given. She always opened her tiny little home near the water and spent time walking through the city with family members who would drop in from all over the place. Everything made her laugh, and I do mean everything. "Isn't that cute!" and "Oh, glory be to Hallelujah!" in the slightest of Irish brogues were her default responses- the former to any sort of story (be it cute or hair raising) and the latter to anything requiring exclamation.
Looking at Kay's lifestyle I'm hopeful she really knew Jesus. She was the most content woman I ever knew, sitting in her tiny apartment, getting a kick out of any trifle someone might send along to say hello, perfectly happy to give generously to anyone who needed it. And for all her cute little Irish ways, she was a fairly bold woman. She spoke her mind simply and without apology, force or defense. She was as genuine as they get. I don't know if she spent any of her thoughts on herself.
This Christmas, I spent the day sicker than I've been in years. When I was able to peel myself off the bathroom floor, I lay on the couch or in bed, miserable. Kay shuffled by the door and poked her head in to ask how I was feeling.
"A little rough," came the response.
"I'm sorry you're not feeling well. I'll pray for you," she said, confidently. Then she waved and cracked her irrepressible grin and shuffled back down the hall with my dad's help.
Oh, the irony. My little aunt, 89 years old, who needed help walking, was praying for me to feel better.
I'm trying to convey a sense of who Kay was, and realize I'm falling painfully short. That's the blessing and curse of knowing somebody- all those glorious pieces that can't be conveyed, only known.
Well, for what it's worth, that was Kay. Constant, genuine, one of the kindest, most gentle souls in the family and fairly difficult to describe in one short volume. Among a cast of vivacious adventurers, Kay was a cheerleader, happy to stay in San Francisco and watch others go everywhere else, cheering them on without a thought that she might be entitled to a little more than a small apartment in the city and a card from the family now and then.
When she got sick this last weekend, we thought it was the same bug that was floating around at Christmas. It might have been, who knows? Whatever it was, it proved too much.
My mom didn't want Kay to die alone, so she and my dad sat with her, holding her hands until she died. And that's the part that tears me to pieces, the thought of Kay drifting out of this world as contentedly as she had lived in it. Such a woman should have been surrounded by the people who loved her, because I want her to have known the true measure of the impact she had. But death came too quickly. With all my heart I praise God she wasn't alone at the end, and part of me wishes very badly I could have seen her off.
When my mom called to tell me Kay had died, I tried putting the impression into words, telling friends it was like a sprawling tree had been cut down, leaving the middle of the forest looking bare. It's not that I was super close to Kay, though she was an incomparable aunt and I'm glad she was mine, but an important piece of the picture is simply gone. Maybe not the focus of a painting, but key to its composition.
No matter how many new years come, death and disaster are our constant companions. Sometimes entire cities topple, sometimes one life at a time. I don't suppose we'd do well if we couldn't measure spans of time, untouched for a moment while we celebrate their newness and the fact that hope, irrepressible, unshakable, always remains.
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