Mary Forsythe

This morning I lost my favorite aunt.  She was my mother's sister.  She was born Mary Elizabeth Forsythe.  She inherited her parent's keen wit and love of learning.  The third child of four in the family and rather in the background, she spent most of her spare time with her Aunt Mary.
 
Her name was Mary but everyone called her Mimi.  Mimi was a thoroughly wonderful person: kind, thoughtful, giving and hysterically funny.  Her sense of humor was sharp and witty.  She loved to laugh and loved it more when others were laughing with her.
 
Mimi was first a mom.  She has three beautiful daughters: Jody, Jackie and Jill.  She loved and worked hard to raise her children to be good people and she succeded.  She also adored her grandchildren - all girls - and loved spending time with them.  And now there is a great grandchild, the apple of her eye Beanie, and two more on the way.  It is sad that they will never meet her.

Mimi loved greatly.  She took in people in need and gave whenever she could.  She was a sucker for romance.  People would gravitate to her.  You could hear her laughing across the room.  As an adult she worked hard.  She was at IBM for many years while her children were young, raising them on her own.  In Boston Mimi and one of her daughters worked a printing company.  She also worked in the Hamptons on Long Island in New York.  Then she moved to Florida, a little trailer near Sanibel.  She loved the coast and her friends there.  Mimi always made friends. 

But she moved back to New York State to be near her children, and her grandchildren.  She was a touchstone to her daughters and was happy they were all close, and close by.  She loved to play.  Mimi was always up for the bowling team or the dart team or the softball team.  She loved to pass time playing cards.  It didn't matter which game it was as long as she was laughing with her friends.

Those two words always come up when you talk about Mimi: laughing and friends.  It seemed she knew everyone, whereever she went people spoke to her, always someone who knew her.  One time she and I were in the drive up lane of some fast food restaurant.  The girl at the window hollared, "Hi, Mimi!"  I made a comment to her about how she seemed to know everyone.  The girl in the window said, "Oh, everybody loves Mimi!" 

And it's true.  Everyone loved Mimi.  If you went into her apartment people would be in and out all day, saying hi, checking on her, taking care she was doing well.  The phone rang quite often and she would talk and laugh, always laugh.

Unless, of course, the Yankees were playing a game on the television.  Then it was time for Gloria Estafan to get a new hairstyle: code for "time to get off the phone".

I will miss my aunt.  I talked to her frequently and got to visit her recently at her home in New York.  She was tired, and not happy that her health was so poor.  But that didn't change her, didn't turn her into a crabby old lady.  The woman was vibrant and happy and ready for a good joke.

I will always remember Mimi laughing.

Bad Times

Mom doesn't want to live feeling like she does anymore.  She's sad and feels hopeless, useless and on a road to more pain.  She's tired of life, wants it over.  There are no emotions left in her.

Being hollowed out and crisp, so light that a light breeze will blow her apart, she sits and waits for it all to end.  Her uncle and aunt both killed themselves at her age.  They used a .22 pistol.  Mom gave away her shotgun a long time ago.  There are no firearms in the house. 

And she's seen what happens to families of people who kill themselves.  They are hurt and angry and they never get over it.  She can't do that to her family, so she's stuck here: wanting to die but not wanting to hurt her family.  It's frustrating and stressful for her, so she just sinks to the bottom of herself and lives like sediment. 

Her daughter left in the night with her grandson, the only happiness she had.  The daughter was angry and abusive to everyone, child included, mom included.  Every room she used was filthy.  It was making mom even crazier. Mom told the daughter she didn't want to live under the circumstances she was creating.  Mom told her she had to start acting like an adult or get out.  A thief in the night, angrily doing her worst.  Daughter knows best how to hurt mother and doesn't hesitate to do it.  She hates her mother and took the only thing that made mom happy.  And she's laughing, I'm sure.

Mom can't make tears anymore.  She's dried up.  She stays alone at home while dad works.  Mom's brother keeps checking on her, making sure she's still breathing.  Sometimes she breathes out and it doesn't come back easily.  She makes herself draw a new breath.  Every minute is work, is finding an incentive to stay for the next one.  Sadness is to light a word.  Gravity draws harder where she steps. 

We try and snuggle up with our warm kitty furs.  It should be helping but she's so deep down, so weighted, I don't know if even we can pull her back up again. 

I'm worried.

Perry