Thoughts on Cousin Patty

She lived 75 years. Never married. Lived at home with her mother, stepfather, and aunt all her life. Had no relationships with anyone that I ever heard. No children. Was a devoted member of her church. Her stepfather and aunt died around 10 years ago. Her mother died last fall in her early 90s. Patty took care of them all. A few months after living alone in the suddenly quiet house, she died.

 

The day after her mother died, we all thought, well, it’s a relief in a way, Patty might just have a life after all. She went to her beauty parlor and had her hair done. The toil of the last 10 years of round-the-clock care for her people was finally over. But her health had been declining for a few years now, but she never focused on that. Everything went to her mother, a large personality who was surely the model for Dana Carvey’s Church lady. Patty passed through 75 years leaving barely a footprint on the earth, an afterthought in most people’s lives. I myself hadn’t seen her in 15 years, though she lived only 30 miles away. There were some close friends who lived in other states, a few relatives she preferred (my sister being one of them). She was pleasant and quiet, and had a nice smile for everyone, even as they were looking past her for her mother.

 

For years I would get a birthday card from her family, with two quarters taped inside. They never used Kennedy half-dollars because he was a Catholic. The card would be signed “Onalee, Frank, and Patty.” The woman was older than my parents but still had her name written on the cards by her mother.

 

When her mother died, the word went out immediately. In fact, there had been a death watch. Patty died last Sunday, and I just learned of it today.

 

I can’t say I knew her well. She was a constant in my young life, one of the older relatives who form a sort of canopy over the life of a child. But we never talked much. Never kissed that I recall—my family is full of non-kissers, something I fight against, with mixed results.

 

Now, at age 50, that canopy I counted on when young is full of holes. Most of the old ones are gone. A few that remain are distant or insensible (another kind of distance). I find I am now part of that canopy, over the young ones in the family. And I am rather remote from a lot of them. Not by choice, but by the happenstance of living.

 

I do not grieve for Patty, because I did not know her, really. But I am sad for a life that never really started. I am sad for myself, I suppose, in that selfish way we all secretly share, in that knowledge that as the old ones pass away, they disappear, and we step up to fill their place.