In Memoriam: Auntie Myra

My Auntie Myra died Tuesday at the hospital after she was hit by a car. She was walking (always walking) in a crosswalk, and a car going 20 mph hit her. This piece is in her honor and for her children, my cousins Anna and Mark, for her brother, my father, and for the extended family and friends who loved her. She was an energetic soul, an adventurer with a generous heart, and I know we will all miss her.

The last time my partner Ann and I visited Myra, Anna, and Mark at Myra’s condominium in Bel Air, Maryland, Myra had ordered a pizza-sized chocolate chip cookie for us all. The only thing I can remember in Myra’s refrigerator when I had visited her house was a passel of containers with broccoli slaw, so I’m pretty sure the giant cookie was an aberration, a celebration of our connection.

Myra has been a deep force of affection in my life for as long as I can remember. We had a lot in common. When I was quite young, not yet in kindergarten, and was visiting my grandmother in Spring Hope, North Carolina, Myra (whom I called Auntie at the time) invited me to sleep with her in the double bed in her childhood room. She warned me that she moved around a lot in her sleep. I was so excited to sleep with my Auntie, and I slept soundly that night, but apparently Myra did not. I guess I moved around a lot in my sleep, too. If I remember right, she said that at one point she woke up, and I was climbing over her.

Whenever Auntie came to visit our home in the Raleigh suburbs in those early years, she would open her arms wide and give me a full body bear hug. I remember my dad walking in the kitchen when she was hugging me once, and he said, “Oh god.”

In her best impersonation of Edith Bunker, she said to him, “Aw, c’mon, Archie,” summoning the television character my dad loved.

Auntie and I both loved to read. One of the first books I remember from her is Aesop’s Fables, an oversized children’s book that I read so many times the deep red and green cover fell off. (It’s not surprising that she was hit walking to the library where she volunteered.) I also remember that she gave me Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the first book I read twice. I finished the last page and immediately turned back to page one. What a gift!

Throughout the decades, when I visited her Bel Air home, I stayed in her guest bedroom with the “Bloom Where You are Planted” framed embroidery. Along with the words, she had stitched a red flower in full bloom, and I always imagined her stitching this piece, the sadness that it suggested and that she never spoke about to me. In the life I witnessed, there was so much love: for me, her children, her cats, her work….

Myra worked in the schools, like I did. I’m not sure what her title was, but in recent decades she worked at the district level, responsible for getting truant kids to go to school. I remember that sometimes she would take them food, clothes, and school supplies and drive them to school herself.

We were also alike in our love of adventure. My dad would laugh about her letters from trips where she would write things like, “Having a great time. My body hurts from the day’s hiking, and the single bare bulb over my bed attracts so many moths that I can barely see.” My dad thought it was hilarious that she was having a great time in such a place: his idea of camping, he once told me, was a Motel 6. I loved such adventures, too.

Myra and her daughter Anna came to Seattle several times. Once was for Ann’s and my commitment ceremony, so I see her photo amidst the well wishers every day. On another visit, the four of us biked to the Red Hook Brewery, a ride Ann and I did fairly often though it was long and exhausting. About a mile from the brewery, I noticed that Myra’s back tire was flat. “I thought I was just a lot slower than the rest of you,” she said. “I’m exhausted.” We had lunch and Ann biked home to get the car, a respite for us all.

Myra might have been more politically liberal than I am. I can’t say that about many people.

I miss her deeply. I feel like I have a weight on my chest that makes it difficult to breathe, but my Auntie remains with me, too, in some way I can’t explain, some way that goes beyond the memories and is more like my skin.

Last week, I wrote an In Memoriam piece about my uncle Tommy, who died last Friday. Auntie Myra died Tuesday. I'm hoping this will be my last In Memoriam piece for a while, but Mom says bad luck comes in threes and Ann and I shouldn't take the stairs. "Be careful," she said. You, too. Be careful.