I’m at the tail end of a a little over a week’s travel through the United States, heading over to Canada for a bit before finishing with a few days in New York and then heading back to Europe.¹ I had some errands to run back here, and there was a larp announced in NYC, and then I decided to do another larp convention back in Europe and things got complicated. But it is what it is.

The errands I’m referring to are things like getting a second passport. I decided to visit Lagos fairly last minute.² This presents a dilemma, since you need to turn in your passport to the Nigerian Embassy for weeks to get the visa, but if you’re traveling outside the country you kind of need it to leave. This is, not surprisingly, a known problem, and it turns out the State Department is perfectly happy to issue you an entirely valid second passport to use while the first one is having the visa applied. So I stopped in San Francisco, and got a second one issued.

I also took advantage of the time to visit friends. I crashed for four days with a friend in Santa Fe, where I discovered the city’s half again as high as Denver and altitude sickness is totally a thing.³ I passed through San Diego for a couple days where I visited the zoo.⁴ The last few days I’ve been crashing with a friend in San Francisco, mostly catching up and relaxing.

But shortly before the weekend, I got word my aunt died. So it’s thrown a sort of pallor over everything.

I can’t talk about my aunt without talking about my mother. It wasn’t just their similarities: the way they looked, or that they both escaped small-town Pennsylvania. It’s that for a long time I never saw my aunt without my mother being there. My uncle served in the military overseas, and so it was a rare family holiday where we’d be gathered together. I remember more than once sneaking down the stairs late on Christmas Eve only to catch sight of my mother and my aunt seated at the kitchen table smoking and talking and laughing late into the night.

I always felt my mother had a way of looking at you which was absolutely ruthless. Not unkind, but unillusioned. It was hard to get away with things around her; you always had the sense she had noticed something you thought you had hidden away. She had a very precise sense of who she was and what she thought. I grew up arguing endlessly about everything in my family — politics, books, art, history — and she never gave an inch she didn’t think you deserved.

My mother died when I was in my 20s. She had gotten sick then gotten better then got sick again, and at that point it was just a slow, inevitable march to the end. She largely kept the worst of it from us, because my family bears sickness like cats and will hide under chairs and hiss at you until we either recover or die. But we knew it was coming, all the same, so it was both utterly expected and completely shocking when it happened.

That’s when I really started to get to know my aunt, separate from my mother. She started hosting Christmas every year, and for the longest time I took a holy pilgrimage every year down to Virginia, a new tradition, one of the few things still binding my extended family together. And sometimes I’d come down a day early, and we’d end up sitting up late at the kitchen table, and it’d feel like talking with my mother again. Same sarcasm, same wit, same stubborn will. She was always pretty sure she was right. She usually was.

I wish I could say I didn’t know what my cousins are going through right now, but I do. My aunt had been ailing for a while, so I wasn’t surprised when I heard she was going into the hospital and it didn’t look good. She passed away a couple days later. I’ve been trying to keep in touch, make sure my uncle and cousins are doing okay. I’m grateful I’ll be able to visit in about a week and pay my respects.

I really thought I’d get at least one more chance to see her. I planned to visit over Christmas. I really wanted to talk to her one last time, see what she thought about current politics, or compare the places she’s seen in the world with the traveling I’m doing. I won’t get that chance. The world just isn’t built so you can love people forever. Eventually, one or the other of you is going to have to leave.

I’ve never completely gotten over the loss of my mother. I don’t think I’ll ever completely get over the loss of my aunt. Maybe that’s for the best. At least this way, you get to carry a piece of them everywhere you go.

Goodbye, Aunt Linda. I’ll miss you.

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Footnotes

¹ Only to turn around three weeks later and come back for Christmas, granted, but here we are

² Over the New Year, which given how long a Nigerian visa takes to get is fairly last minute

³ It may not help much, but there’s a spa just outside the city called Ten Thousand Waves styled after a Japanese onsen where for about $35 you can soak in a public bath and sit in a sauna and then come down in a relaxation room where they totally don’t care if you sleep on the floor mats.

⁴ As I keep telling people, the great thing about the San Diego Zoo is that for the rest of your life if anyone asks if you want to visit a zoo you have an excuse to not go — sure, it might be nice, but it’s not the San Diego Zoo.

It really was probably the best zoo I’ve ever been to, with clear efforts to keep the animals happy and healthy — the big thing now is “enrichment” which involves reworking the pens and providing things to keep the animals engaged, like hiding meatballs all around the jaguar enclosure so they have to leap around and track all them down — and a laudable commitment to animal conservation. A lot of it is targeted at kids, but in the long run that’s probably for the best; an army of 7-year-olds pestering their parents to recycle is probably going to be more effective, in the long run, then another round of terrifying memes about the rainforest.