Aunt Lillian’s Gift

On the day Aunt Lillian died, I was wearing her bracelet. I could not be at the funeral, a continent away, but I carried her necklace in my purse.

Three years ago, when we were in Boston for the Jewish holidays, she had beckoned me and my two older sisters. She wanted to give us something. Already she’d offered Julie, the eldest, a cameo pendant. Aunt Lillian was dying after all; she was done with her jewelry.

*

At Rosh Hashanah, 1994, Aunt Lillian was 86 years old. She weighed 68 pounds.

Touching her back was like grabbing for the old rocking chair. Her legs were broom handles, her arms chopsticks. Five stiff, curved claws resembling bent bamboo shoots sprouted from each hand. You couldn’t really hug her--any more than you can hug the old rocking chair. It might hurt.

For six decades, Aunt Lillian had been married to Uncle Morrie, my dead grandfather’s brother and only survivor of my maternal great-grandparents’ seven children. She had always taken care of Uncle Morrie; now she couldn’t care for herself.

Aunt Lillian had always been a stubborn old coot, independent to a fault, tough to talk to because she was always right. She’d always been rail thin, bursting with inexplicable energy and dieting, dieting, dieting. Always been old, at least as far as I could remember.

Now she was past old, less than thin and far too tired to fulfill her own stubborn quirks.

Preparing for the visit, I wondered what stuff I might collect over the next 60 years, whom I might give it to when I was finally ready to die. I hoped they might know me better than I knew Aunt Lillian.

*

The three of us walked in hesitantly. We had brought a package of mother’s stuffed cabbage as a gift/offering and our own grandmother as a generational ambassador. We sat down, each young woman paired with one of the old set: Debbi talked to Uncle Morrie on the mustard love seat, Julie sat with Aunt Lillian on the antique couch and Nana pulled a chair from the dining table next to mine.

Debbi offered to put the cabbage into the freezer but Aunt Lillian insisted on doing it herself. We ached as we watched her hobble with her huge cane across the living room. Debbi held the small tinfoil rectangle in limp hands, trying to help an old woman without stealing her dignity.

Uncle Morrie passed snapshots of their grandchildren: one, a former campaign worker for President Clinton, being sworn in as a lawyer; the other, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman about my age, graduating from college or high school.

Nana whispered to me, clucking her tongue and shaking her head, about how sick Aunt Lillian had become, how obstinate she’d always been.

“She used to go shopping for four or five hours straight and then come home and collapse,’ confided Nana, who stays inside for a week to nurse a runny nose and cancels plans to go to the beauty shop when clouds appear. “Now she can’t do anything.’

Nana, nearly deaf, couldn’t hear that Aunt Lillian was clucking away, too, over on the couch, telling Julie how she lied to Nana every day.

“I tell her I feel fine because that’s what she wants to hear,’ the frail old woman hissed. “We never got on too well . . . but all we’ve got now is each other.’

*

Her floor-length robe zipped to the chin, Aunt Lillian was still cold. She crept away and came back in a thicker robe, motioning us to join her at the dining table for the giveaway. Uncle Morrie stayed in the corner, shaking his head, the fly of his checkered pants unzipped.

We were silent, watching Aunt Lillian’s brittle fingers futz with little bags and boxes filled with baubles and beads. She’d dump them out, peering at things through her big eyeglasses and bigger hand-held magnifier, chattering away a life full of stories.

There was the necklace, a flat circle of ivory on a sleek gold chain, that Uncle Morrie had given her in the hospital after she had a heart attack. That she wanted us to take to our mother. Treasured matching rings she had shared with her sister--those she was saving for the granddaughter in the graduation picture.

For us, though, there was plenty. Debbi got a funky ivory necklace from Israel and two lovely rings, one opal that she would eventually wear to her own wedding, the other garnet. Julie took some simple amber beads and a delicate gold-link bracelet.

I wore a wonderful sterling pendant with a stone like a mood ring, a chunky bracelet of deeply colored rocks and a marvelous green lump of a ring surrounded by rhinestone chips.

“I love this piece, but I just can’t wear it anymore,’ Aunt Lillian would say as she picked up something shiny and heavy. As though she could wear any rings on her arthritic hands, bear any necklace on her sunken chest. As though she would soon be getting dressed, going somewhere.

We said thank you a hundred times. Lillian was tired, weary of the business of dying. We got up to go.

“I can’t sleep anymore,’ she told us. “My days are nights and my nights are days. It’s no good, no good.

“I can’t eat,’ she added, as though we couldn’t tell.

“But I don’t want you to remember me like this,’ Lillian said finally. “Always remember me dancing. Doing the Charleston.’

*

I touch the stones on my wrist and around my neck. Close my eyes. Try to see the brittle bones with more flesh, the sunken chest filled out, sparkling jewelry on her arms and ears to match sparkling eyes. The Charleston?

We last met in a depressing nursing home, too stuffy and hot for anyone who wasn’t sick. I sat on the edge of Aunt Lillian’s bed, sorting a bag of mixed gourmet jellybeans into a compartmentalized box with labels for each fancy flavor. It was hard to tell the Pina Colada from the Pineapple.

It was November and the family had gathered in Boston for Debbi’s wedding, which Aunt Lillian was too sick to attend.

I never did get to see her dance.