MAE

first published in The Heartlands Today: Midwest Characters & Voices, 9, Fall, 1999. Bottom Dog Press.

I open the door at 12:45 a.m. to see that the one red eye on the telephone is blinking. One call. I rewind, wait for the pause, and listen: "Jane. This is your mother. More bad news. Your Aunt Mae died this morning." I spend an almost sleepless night as I wait for the world to wake up so I can call my mother back, my sisters, my kids, my cousins-- what we do when death hits a large family.

"We love you so much, Janie," Aunt Mae said to me at an after-Christmas dinner at the Red Lobster in Marquette, Michigan. Her last words to me. Aunt Mae, 90, was my father's sister, and I loved her very much. Funny, outrageously frank, one of our family matriarchs. Memories fly over me as I wait for morning. Years pass into minutes as I think about old times. Mae's only daughter, my cousin Suzanne, was nine months old when Mae's first husband died. Our two families lived together during the mid-1940s in Bremerton, Washington, where our parents worked at the Navy Yard, Mae as a nurse, my dad as an electrician building ships, my mother as a secretary. Suzanne and I attended nursery school together.

It is March now. The snow is deep this year and unforgiving, the roads slippery, dangerous with the ice. Time and memories wind up in Saturday sauna nights at Grandma, when uncles and aunts filled the lit house with singing around the piano, when the brothers lined up on the bench in the cooling room outside the sauna, six bald heads, the aunts gossiping about Aunt Lynn's divorce, kids running through the house, the china cabinet rattling. Or in Thanksgivings in the kitchen, when Grandma, massive, sat holding a white china cup caked with brown gravy, the holiday turkey in the oven.

Grandma and Grandpa Piirto came to Ishpeming, Michigan, Barnum Location, from Ilmajoki in Ostrobothnia, Finland. A location is a neighborhood that grows up around a mine. In this instance, the Barnum iron mine, one of eight in our town. Their first son became a dentist. The next six children were girls. Four were teachers; one went to beauty school, and Aunt Mae became a nurse. My father was the first boy after the six girls. Four more boys followed, twelve children in all. Today, there are 25 of us first cousins.

A photograph from 1927 sits on my dresser. Six Piirto sisters, six young women in cloche hats looking like flappers, lying on their bellies coquettish on the grass staring into a camera, their eggs still unfertilized in their wombs. Now four of the sisters are dead, two are in rest homes, and only one Piirto brother is left.

Time is breaking like this dawn, a gray rising as the cousins gather, slide into memory, pay respect to time. Aunt Mae was the sister who left Ishpeming to go to nursing school "down below." "Down below" means the land of trolls, Michigan's Lower Peninsula, below the Mackinac Bridge, the Straits of Mackinac. Aunt Mae went to a Catholic nursing school in Detroit, and then settled in to work in a hospital in Ann Arbor before finishing her career as a nurse in the health center at Eastern Michigan University. Mae was always "spunky," in my father's words. She had her own mind and didn't hesitate to show it.

Daylight. I hadn't realized how this would feel, how important Mae was, still is, to me. The weeping on Friday morning after an almost sleepless night leaves me drained and logy. I am unable to retain composure as my colleagues see me with my head on my desk as they pass by my office, and I break into tears as I say, "I just found out that a precious aunt has died. Yes, suddenly. No. She lived long. She was 90. I just hadn't realized how sad I would feel, how important she was to me. I can't stop crying." I regain my composure and do a few chores, and then a memory floods over me and I dissolve again. I hear four stories from them about their own aunts and how they loved them. I call my choir director and can't remember his last name, though I've seen him and worked with him regularly for years. "I can't sing on Sunday." Sobs arise. He tells me a story of his aunt in Pennsylvania. I call Nancy, in my women's trio. "I can't sing on Sunday." "OK. It'll be OK."

I am not the one with the big loss; it is Suzanne who has it. Why am I so useless? I sleep the stuffed sleep of one who has wept all day long. The next morning I shower and am throwing things into a suitcase when I hear the phone. It is my cousin Bette Lynn in Northville, Michigan, near Detroit. She says she will wait for me to pick her up on my way to Marquette. I fill my cat's bowl and leave a note for my neighbor who will feed him, clear the kitchen, and leave my town of Ashland, Ohio, 600 miles from my destination far to the north.

Three hours later I pull into Bette Lynn's. A few minutes of conversation with her husband who helps us load the car, and we are off. It is good to see her. We talk as we drive about the family, the aunts, the uncles, our grown children, the grandchildren, the cousins, diets and books we've read lately, avoiding the topic of politics. Bette Lynn is a conservative Republican like her school principal father, and I am a liberal Democrat like my union steelworker father. The brothers-in-law battled for years over unions and the New Deal, over Eisenhower and Stevenson, over Wallace and Roosevelt. Over Clinton and Dole, if Bette Lynn and I would talk about this. But we don't. Our fathers could remain friends and argue bitterly, but Bette Lynn and I are women and we want to make nice. So we avoid the potential conflict.

Ten hours later, as we pull into Marquette, it is snowing with snow banks twelve to twenty feet high. Slick roads have caused an accident. We pass the flashing lights and confused drivers very slowly, the car swaying. "Respect the ice," my father told me when he taught me to drive in the Upper Peninsula winters. I make this trip often, but usually watch the Weather Channel for days in advance to anticipate sudden snowstorms, as I've had near-death experiences on the near-wilderness two-lane highways driving alone from the Mackinac Bridge to Marquette.

We stop by Aunt Mae's first. It is 7:30 and just getting dark. Our feet make slide marks in the new snow. Suzanne had come from Boston a few days ago, when she heard her mother had fallen, and she answers the door almost before we knock. We hug and hold each other gratefully, then stamp the snow off our feet, move inside and sit down in the familiar doily-covered furniture of the living room. In the corner of the room I see the photo albums, the prosaic three-foot-high stack of family chronicles of gatherings, visits, and smiling faces around party tables. Mae was the family photographer, and the array-- taken with polaroids, instamatics, and box camera-- provided hours of family entertainment each time we got together. Many grandchildren, bored with adult talk, perused the pile.

We begin to talk about Aunt Mae. Suzanne describes how Mae was filled with tubes and plugged into machinery, and how they said they could keep her alive for a few days, but she was brain dead, and how she and Ray decided to let her go, and how they each took one hand, and watched the machinery as the flat line indicated that this earthly life was over. I say my uncle Arvo, on my mother's side, had pulled out his own plugs when he died in that same hospital of pancreatic cancer just two weeks ago. "I'm glad we were with her," Suzanne says. Her face is a little redder than usual, but otherwise she looks fine. She is always contained, sleek, sophisticated, slim, a Boston business woman, a manager of multimillion dollar properties. Managing here as well.

Except for an odd gesture. She runs into the other room and comes out with a heavy load in a brown garbage bag. "Here, Bette Lynn. Take these clothes to Aunt Ty. My mother hardly wore them. I went through her clothes and have given most of them to St. Vincent de Paul's, and these are her best ones. Give them to Ty." Ty doesn't wear good clothes in the rest home, and in fact, Bette Lynn just told me a story about how Ty's famous paranoia is still with her despite the psychotropic medication. She rolls all the decent clothes Bette brings her up into wads and hides them in suitcases because she's afraid someone will steal them. She wears sloppy clothes. Bette doesn't say anything, and accepts the clothes. The kitchen table is filled with muffins and cookies and an elegant lemon cake with strawberries on it, underneath a dome on a pedestal cake carrier, brought by Mae's retired nurse's club. "Take these. Have some."

We refuse and after we have kissed Uncle Ray, who has been unable to find the paper containing the obituary this stormy night, we go to Ishpeming where my mother waits with meat loaf and wild rice-wheat bread just baked. and we eat a sandwich, drink a glass of wine, and talk around the kitchen table. I stay up to watch the local news, as is my pleasure when I come home, and this little snow squall put the snowfall over the all-time record, which was last year. Now 252.7 inches has fallen in the area.

The next day in the funeral home, Bette Lynn, Mother, and I take awhile to muster our courage before going in. This will be hard. I timidly approach, and then my chest lurches and I flinch and turn away. I can't look. I can't. I slowly turn and look at her over my shoulder, and shrink away again. I cover my face with my hands as the tears and sobs start. My mother and Bette are experiencing similar physical reactions of grief, disbelief, and pain. I stumble to the doorway of the room and lean against it next to some yellow mums and orange tiger lilies and white callas lilies. I steel myself to look again. This is it. Aunt Mae. Dead. Dead dead dead.

I understand why they open the coffin and make the person up. We do it so that the living can see that the dead are really dead. Our father was in a closed coffin and perhaps I have never truly realized that he is dead because I didn't see him painted up and powdered and lying there. Suzanne is hugging Bette. My mother is sobbing alone. I go to her and she puts her head into my shoulder. After a few minutes it is over and we stagger out.

After the funeral home, we all go to the home of another cousin. In true fashion, when the family gets together, the noise gets louder and louder as we eat the pizza, lasagna, with soft and hard drinks, getting to know one another again. The warm glow of the atmosphere was one Aunt Mae would have loved. I sit sometimes silently, overwhelmed by memory of the family times this gathering recalls, knowing that whether I say one word or hold forth for an hour, I am loved and in a family.

"He's better off," I overhear a cousin say about her son whose wife divorced him after he suffered a brain tumor. I hear echoes of the family's talks about other members who have experienced tragedy and come home. "She's better off," the aunts said about Lynn, who left Elmer who made her sell liquor in a grocery store when she was a trained schoolteacher! "She's better off" here with us, the family, who love her.

The grace of this glow reminds me of childhood sauna Saturday nights at Grandma's in Ishpeming when we cousins played, running around and screeching while our parents caught up on news and gossip. Now, fifty years later, we share pictures of grandchildren and children. I show the christening pictures of my granddaughter in the lace dress and bonnet I sewed. How beautiful my daughter is and what a good-looking man my son has become! Our oohs and ahs about these our offspring, make me begin to realize that this ceremony of the wake is exactly that, we stay a-wake, redefining ourselves as cousins when the most influential aunt to many of us, Aunt Mae, has died. We are awake while she is back at the funeral home in her red suit, her glasses perched on her nose above her closed eyes, the bruise on her forehead from where she took the fall that put her into the coma, delicately powdered over beneath the feathered white hair, but still visible. Her small hands folded over her stomach.

Palm Sunday morning: the snow banks are so high you can't see the other side of the street from the front window. The backyard swing chains, mired, are embedded halfway up. The crotch in the apple tree barely shows above the snow. Indeed the sky is blue, the sun bright and cold. The snow is so deep that the street, usually wide enough, even in deepest winter, for two lanes of traffic between the hand-built stone walls, is reduced to three ruts, the outside ones iced, the middle one shared by passing cars, as one car has to stop and park while the other passes.

We drive to the old house, sold about ten years ago, after Aunt Lynn died. The new owners have parked their rickety car in the plowed driveway, and smoke comes out of the old chimney. We take pictures in front of the huge snowbank which is the same color as the house with its gables. I imagine I see Grandma Piirto rocking on the front porch. We don't stay long. We go to Marquette for an early brunch, and for a ride to see the blue ice on Lake Superior, and then stop to buy music by the local Finnish reggae group, "Conga Se Menne."

Then we go to the nursing home to visit Aunt Siiri, 95 years old. Siiri is recovering from hip surgery and her flat breasts and frail arms in her purple and white print silky dress show the struggle and the loss of vigor. A thin fine blue vein throbs beneath the white translucent skin of her forehead. But Siiri is improved now, as neat in appearance as ever. She repeatedly says she regrets that she doesn't have any coffee to serve us. It's a good sign. Siiri pulls up the lap robe to cover her bare toes in the cast propped up on a leg rest on the wheelchair. "I feel so empty," she says. We all agree. We encourage Siiri not to try to come to the funeral, as she needs to trained attendants to move her. This is the last time we will see her. Three months later, Siiri is also dead.

Back home, Bette Lynn tells Mother to look through the clothes, because they are sure to be too small for Ty. Mother tries on a houndstooth-checked jacket bought last October in Boston, only worn a couple of times. It fits. I say I have heard that wearing the clothes of a dead relative makes you feel hugged by them. But we are all uneasy. Mother digs through the brown garbage bag and tentatively pulls out one or two other things, and then says, "I can't do it. I can't wear it." I agree that I couldn't either, and so does Bette, and though Suzanne is acting so calm and in control, the brown garbage bat freshly filled with the fresh clothes from the fresh dead is a sign she isn't.

The funeral director says, "You want to sit with the family, don't you?" Seven rows of family. A lot on such short notice and in such a remote area, hard to get to. In the back of us on both sides of the church are Mae's and Ray's friends. We have barely sat down in the church when the funeral directors wheel the closed coffin to the front, with its dove gray pearlized finish. A large bouquet of white carnations and red roses in ferns lies along the top. The service begins with Sibelius' Finlandia chorus on the organ. The program says, "March 24, 1997. A celebration of the Life and Faith of Mae Suzanne Spencer." During the prelude, I look around the old church, noticing its simple white plaster, its dark brown carved beams, the cross suspended, the Old English stained glass windows, the faded purple and yellow Victorian-looking flowers through which the light of day surges.

Lately, in my own middle age, I have an affair with churches like this, comforting churches, a little dim, with worn places where hands gripped the backs through many Methodist hymns sung over the past century. The minister points us to the Words of Grace, greets us, and we stand and sing. "I love this hymn," my mother says. I nod, and as we sing, I hear the beautiful singing voice of my cousin's daughter next to me. We all repeat Psalm 23. We sing "Beautiful Savior." When the minister begins his sermon, he looks on us, Mae's family, in the first seven pews, and tells us outright, "You are lucky. I look at this family gathered together to mourn your Mae, and all I can think is you are lucky. Many people don't have what you have." And I look around and know he is right. We are enfolded in the bosom of a large and loving family, And Mae was her generation's main enfolder.

Mae. The family's memory carrier -- old dates, family legends -- what year was it Lynn was married? 1948? 1950? We ask Mother, and she can't remember. We asked Siiri, but she can't remember. But Mae would have. Important family memories have died with this woman. After the sermon, prayers, and final hymn, the family files slowly from the church. The burial and commitment service will have to be delayed because there is so much snow in the cemetery.

In the basement of the church, the women have provided trays of food -- noodles, Jell-O, casseroles, date bars and brownies, pink lemonade, ham and cheese on buttered Parker rolls, coffee and tea. The family lingers for two hours before dispersing. We hug and circulate, and I tell everyone who will listen about my gratitude to the pastor for his insight: "You are lucky. To be in such a large and loving family." We all agree. We feel enfolded. Mae and Siiri and Ty fill our thoughts, and as Bette Lynn and I drive back down over the Mackinac Bridge, listening to the new CD and singing along in our twin cousin voices, Bette Lynn says, "You know why it's so sad when aunts die? It means we can't be little girls any more. It means that now we are the matriarchs."