After my great aunt wouldn't stay dead
we'd find her in the oddest places:
back of the toolshed weeping unconsolably
or shuffling into the bedroom at two a.m.
disoriented, half asleep,
breath vapor fogging the cold blue windows.
"Tante Martha," I pleaded, "tell me what's wrong."
"It's not how they advertised it.
It's all overrated."
"What is?" I asked. "What?"
"Death, you dummy.
Death."
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ReplyDeleteI found the beginning of this poem in an old journal and added the second stanza.
ReplyDeleteTante Martha was an enigma to me. For thirty years I heard her complain about how hard it was to be old and how she wished she could die. She immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s, kept house for Hollywood movie moguls, married but never had kids. She could never let go of her fixation on the glory days (as she envisioned it) of pre-WWI Germany. She downplayed the holocaust as "Jewish propaganda", espoused that Germany was the cornerstone of world culture and civilization, and could not seem to move ahead with her life. She finally got her wish and died in her 90s.