Aunt Margie

My wife is going to a wake tomorrow for Aunt Margie, who passed away at 89. Margie was one of five from a branch of my wife's family. There is only one left now, Aunt Emma, who is 84, hardy, alert, in good health and spirits, a widow, who has also outlived one of her three children. Aunt Emma is the herald for news from this branch.

Margie at 89 was not the oldest. That would have been Herbert, and he died several years ago. In human duration, 89 years is quite a chunk of time. Margie, also a widow, outlived one of her five children. Margie lived independently until the last 6 months of her life, when she entered a nursing home, something she abhorred. This led Aunt Emma to ask a priest, how does a woman who raised 5 kids, have 4 still left and living near her, not have one of them take care of her? The priest had no answer.

But 89 is an advanced age, and at that point even surviving children are not themselves young. Still, the priest had no answer.

People at any age are always looking back, and I'm sure Margie did her share of that. I know I do, and I'm not her age. Sometimes there are things I remember that were so long ago I wonder if they really happened, or did I just read about them?

Time times rate equals distance; t x r = d. That's the formula for computing distance. But time in human life terms is also distance. You cover a lot of ground in 89 years, even if you never move far from where you started. Eighty-nine years is a long look back. It's quite a distance.

I think of the astronauts on the moon looking back at earth. It's a long way back to where we come from.

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