Academic anecdotes and ethical essays

In Remembrance:  My Auntie Chris

I remember my Auntie Chris.  Blonde, fun, vibrant, and playfully devious with a wicked sense of humour.  For nearly twenty years, while I grew up, she lived at the back of my parents’ property in the coach house.  At times, I would visit daily.  She would make me tea (and not just give me milk with a little hot water like my mom did). 

I have many fond memories of those visits.  Watching Days of Our Lives, playing with her multipoo Daisy (one in a long line of loyal poodle crosses) but most of all being creative with her art supplies.  Crayons, paint, pastels—she had a miniature art studio set up for me.  There’s one picture in particular that comes vividly to mind.  I created it over and over, never quite getting it right, but always determined to try again.  Recently, I decided to recreate it once more.  When I think of my Auntie Chris, I think of her in the sun above the mountains and green fields.

I remember often playing in the back of the property, in the small patch of forest behind the coach house where Auntie Chris lived.  In reality, this bushy area had a dozen cedars and firs at most.  But in my child’s mind, monsters and magic illuminated this vast wilderness. 

One day, when I was maybe nine, I decided to make a swinging rope by her house.  So I pulled out my Dad’s ladder and found the highest possible place to tie it.  Just as I was about to throw the rope over the branch, I heard:  “Lee, what are you doing?”

“Nothing,” I replied.

“That’s too dangerous,” Auntie Chris said.

“I’m all right.”

“If you don’t stop, I’ll tell your mom!”

One of the reasons I played so far back on the property, is because this was the furthest I could possibly get from my parents.  So I obliged my Auntie Chris and put the ladder away.  Unusual for her to be finicky with the rules.  Her rebellious life motto?  “Live fast, die young!”  Perhaps she was worried I would fall.  In fact, she witnessed me doing just that some ten years later. 

I was cleaning my parents’ roof without a tether.  One wrong step from shingle to fibreglass sent me plummeting head first to the ground.  The ambulance came and I looked up to see Auntie Chris hovering over me.  “Are you all right?” she asked.  She knew a lot about ambulances and hospitals.  More than most should know. 

My Aunt and I shared many things.  A love for words.  A love for travel.  (“You have to go to Greece!” she told me many times.)  A love for animals.  A love for the ocean.  A love for dragons and unicorns and all things magical.  And a love for storytelling.  In the last few months before she passed, I went through all her photos with her, found in a suitcase of memories hidden under her bed, too long forgotten.  She told me tales from her life, sometimes wickedly wily, and always full of wonder and wit.

She told me of her brother-in-law, Frank Lambert, who was like a father to her.  She told me of her grandfather, Thomas Craven, who at the age of forty fell in love with a sweet Irish colleen and emigrated from England to Canada.  She told me about her sister, my Aunt Betty—a brilliant writer, larger than life—who passed away when I was six.  She told me about my parents’ meeting for the first time while she was recovering from a massive heart attack.  As strange and hurtful as it is to say, if it weren’t for her maladies that fateful encounter may never have happened, and I would not have been conceived four years later.

What impressed me most about my aunt?  Her zest for life.  She never complained.  Hit five times with rheumatic fever (the first at age three), two heart attacks, bacterial endocarditis, one stroke, two open heart surgeries, bipolar illness, numbing depressions, two bouts of breast cancer, diabetes, hip replacement and finally lung and bone cancer:  if there was someone deserving of complaint, it was her.  I remember picking her up from the hospital, just a few days before she died.  The pharmacist had given her the wrong dose of diabetes medication.  As a result, Chrissie’s blood sugar dropped four times below normal.  She couldn’t speak, her words unintelligible.  Half her day was spent in observation at the hospital, crammed into the emergency ward.  Too many of her precious few hours left with her husband Jay were stolen from her.  From this pharmaceutical error, she could have easily died. 

I picked her up in the afternoon.  She was lucid and her chatty self again, friendly with the nurses. As we drove Chrissie commented on how nice the pharmacist was to her, and thanked me repeatedly for the ride home.  Thinking back, I can’t recall a single complaint.  The tears that fall now are homages to her strength.  To live being happy with what you are given, is to live like my Auntie Chris did.

In her final night, I sat next to her hospital bed for several hours.  She stirred only once, when the nurses turned her.  She didn’t know I was there.  Not consciously, anyway.  I can only hope my presence somehow made that final sleep more comforting.

I’ll miss my visits and Auntie Chris’s stories.  I’m sure I’ll get to Greece someday soon, and I’ll take more than her playful spirit with me.  Her final request was to have her ashes travel around the world.  She has already been to Iceland this past summer.  Next year I'll take her to Korea.

For her celebration of life, she wanted everyone to blow bubbles.  And so we did, as my dad sang “This Little Light of Mine.”  With Chrissie's blessing, we spread a little more magic.

Your loving nephew,
Lee

 

To the left is the memory table prepared for my aunt.  Photos, cards, books, heart valves, and other memorabilia.  For Chrissie's celebration of life, I helped create an eight-page pamphlet.  The text was written by Chrissie’s sister (my Mom). 

Click here to read the pamphlet (pdf file, 200 kb).