An era ended last week when my Aunt Calysta passed; she was just shy of her ninetieth birthday. My sister and I visited her recently. Before I arrived, health concerns landed her in the hospital.
The doctor promised, “we’ll let you out of here when your blood pressure goes down.”
“It will go down, if I am not in here,” she answered. By the time I arrived, she had returned home with oxygen tanks and tubes.
“Let’s all go get a pedicure this weekend. I will pay,” she suggested.
“Okay,” we agreed.
We never went. Instead my sister, cousins and I spent the afternoon playing Mexican Train on the covered patio while she slept in the nearby lounge chair. After I left, she returned to the hospital twice and then went to Hospice care. She died at home in her own bed, as she wanted.
So, her death did not surprise me, still it left me sad. She was not just my aunt. She, and all the other Hibbard aunts and uncles parented us in our early years. For instance, Aunt Calysta noticed me slouched in a chair and said, “You are getting round shouldered. You must be sleeping with a pillow.”
I murmured something, went home and tossed my pillow off the bed before I laid flat on my back to straighten up those shoulders. Only becoming a teenager who wanted to wear curlers to bed brought back my pillow.
I felt very privileged the year she chose me to be her ‘daughter’ at her church’s mother and daughter banquet. I packed up clothes for the party and pajamas to stay all night with her and Uncle Dick. The afternoon of the banquet, when I saw she had put on her party clothes, I dressed for the banquet and waited impatiently for what seemed like a long time until we left. I was so excited about the banquet with her.
One spring, my family moved from New York to Arizona. We missed our cousins, aunts and uncles. They missed us so much that a month before school re-opened, Aunt Calysta and her children, Jim and Sarah, came to visit.
They checked out the desert, our house and the church. Then before going home, Aunt Calysta packed up all seven kids in the family station wagon and we drove west to the Pacific Ocean. We camped near the shore and spent a couple days at the ocean. The guys rented a surfboard to try. I enjoyed bouncing into the surge of the waves until I stepped on a stingray, and it punctured the instep of my foot.
That hurt!
Aunt Calysta, a trained nurse, took me to the emergency room where I joined a line of other stingray victims seeking relief from the pain those critters inflict. I spent the rest of the camp-out sitting on a towel with Aunt Calysta watching the others body surf and play in the water.
The weekend I married, Aunt Calysta and Aunt Erma drove 12 hours to my wedding with their younger children. Unintentionally, they all wore coordinating polyester double knit dresses made by Grandma Hibbard.
After marriage I lived too far away for more than short chats with Aunt Calysta when we went home to visit. She always listened politely and commented, “That’s wonderful. That’s good.” She said the same during my recent visit, but the words lacked her previous energy. In spite of her declining health, we had a good visit. We moved furniture around to accommodate her yards of cannula tubing. We watched the shows she liked, prayed over her and quietly negated most activities to simply sit and visit. I’m glad I went. It was the best closing to that era of my life.