Losing those who formed you...sibs, parents, quasi-parents...changes everything.
This has been a month of understanding that I may shortly lose some people who, in my childhood, formed me, and that some who are coming after me, "young" people, may in their turn be facing great losses. It makes me think, and feel, about the meaning and effects of loss.
I live in the South; the South formed me. In the 1970s, I began to understand the criminal history of the "nice" people I knew, the "nice" society I belonged to, the lovely manners and the beautiful silver, and the kind, drawling voices of people who were cultured, educated, and who loved their negro servants while at the same time participating in the system that kept them poor and desperate for escape.
Our beloved Helen came in to our house every week, cleaning, sometimes cooking, and always offering the most scaldingly honest assessment of the dysfunction that was my parents' relationship. No one understood them like she did. No one could deconstruct more accurately what needed to happen than she did.
And no one in our house, I may say, listened until I did. I listened to what she had to say. And with that perspective, I learned to see my parents' difficulties and to forgive them, as she did (after all, they weren't actually her family, so it was easier for her to see and forgive).
In the 1970s, I began to get an understanding, partial, of what it must be like to be her. I decided to travel with her. In '74, I took her for a trip to see my brother on the other side of the continent, in British Columbia. She trembled, passing over long bridges over the silvery Western rivers. She chuckled, using my brother's outhouse (it had been many years since she'd had to do that). And she flew back to her relatives in South Bend, Indiana, fearful of flying alone and handling it with superb skill, as always.
Helen is lying in hospice now, 98 years old, beautiful, dark-skinned, high-cheekboned, reserved, dignified. She will die soon. When she dies, my last mother will be gone.