My mother’s
only sister passed away yesterday, taking with her an
entire era of my family’s history; of her generation, only
a brother remains on my mother’s side. Theirs was a generation
which seemed to produce more than its share of great ladies,
and I can say quite without bias that my mother and her
sister were among them. You can judge the success of a person’s
life, I think, by how many phone calls must be made to notify
people of their death. It took two of us the better part
of a day to contact everyone with a close personal interest
in my aunt’s passing.
She took with
her not only the supportive safety net a loving parental
figure (for she was truly my second mother) alone can offer,
but also thousands of small, interesting stories and bits
of family lore unavailable from any other source. We’d been
asking her questions since mom died several years ago...stories
about our parents when they were young, about her, about
the family. But in the end I’m sure there were many questions
we didn’t think to ask.
Since 1971 we’d
been co-parented by our mother and aunt. Soon after my father
died in an accident, our mother brought us to California
where we lived for awhile with my aunt and her husband,
who took us in with an unquestioning generosity which we
took for granted until many years later, when we’d discovered
just how rare such qualities were.
That Auntie
loved us was never in question, but hers was not the unquestioning
love for which our mother was legendary. Appropriately
for a woman born with the Sun in a tight conjunction
with Saturn, Auntie was a woman whose approval had to
be earned; she held us to a very high standard, but she
also had a genuine and abiding interest in the world which
extended to all of us. If you had a problem of the heart,
you went to my mother; but if you had a practical, real
world problem or achievement, you took it to Auntie, and
she’d help you sort it out or celebrate it. Earning her
praise was an absolute rush. Of course, when you were out
of line or had disappointed her, she didn’t hesitate to
let you know about that too. Mom gave us heart, but Auntie
gave us spine.
The formidable
matriarchs in all our lives—symbolized astrologically by
Cancer, the Moon, and the fourth house—orient us in the
world by insisting on the importance of things essential
and irreplaceable: history, family, lineage. For years
I had no place in my life for these things, and resisted
the familial obligations my mother and her sister tried
to foist on me. I had watched them give endlessly to others
on the basis of their blood connection to us, and as I watched
them both grow tired and ill and spent at an early age I
drew conclusions which connected their philanthropy to their
illnesses. Not for me, I decided early on, and blithely
ignored any family member not in my direct vicinity, and
many who were. Despite the example of my mother and aunt,
I didn’t yet appreciate the notion of blood connection and
tribe. I suppose it’s because I had the luxury of their
protective generational buffer between me and rootlessness.
While the
most potent astrological symbol of womanhood—the Moon, ruler
of Cancer—is synonymous with caretaking, heritage, and nurturing,
caring for others and defending family bonds are not necessarily
the sole dominion of women. In my family, however, it
has always been so. For a clan full of fishermen, sailors,
sad cases, and various lost souls, women like my mother
and aunt were our true north, guiding us gently away
from the rocks.
Yesterday, as
my aunt’s daughter, my sister, and I rushed around, providing
food and comfort—a little clumsily, like children playing
dress up—while waves of grieving men and children washed
up against us, I thought, Good god, now we’re all that’s
left. Our mothers left us their compass, hidden deep
in our fourth houses like buried treasure; but we’ll have
to learn to read it ourselves if we’re to bring this ship
safely into harbor.
I
wonder, when the torch passed to them, if they felt so small
and inadequate to the task, so unprepared and false. How
did they know so much, bear so much, love so much? Those
are the questions we forgot to ask. Maybe we hold the answers
in our memories of their examples. Or maybe we’ll find them
on hot summer nights, gazing up at the moon and asking her
to share with us her secrets, the secrets of history and of
women.
