blues for my aunt

blues for my aunt

fiction
edward w pritchard

We must be realistic and part of the common logical consensus when it comes to approaching the death of someone we know but haven't seen much in the last fifty years. We shouldn't be like one of my favorite humans Beatle George Harrison also recently passed away who said once in an interview I watched " people are die-ing [ dying] everywhere all the time and no one is doing anything about it." Yes George you said a mouth full there, after this, that; when that is non existence.

My Aunt passed away today. Her first husband was a Marine related to me through my Mother. My Aunt was young pretty and happy the time before last I saw her and had a lilt to herself like a bird going about the business of living unconcerned about the cosmic significance of things. She raised children, cooked and cleaned a house. She was loved by her Mother who lived close by and being her Mother's only child she was cherished and helped in life's difficulties as practical.

Then she was a divorced old woman when I next and last saw her with some senility, now called Alzheimer's disease living with a new husband who loved her and I suppose she liked to look at blooming colorful flowers on the cactus plants out in the desert where she lived and enjoyed the sun rises and sunsets despite her deteriorating physical and mental capacities as an old Woman whose facilities were waxing away as the material part of herself prepared to return to where ever our elemental parts go after we, our unique selves,  become non existent.

Way back my Aunt was the pretty neighbor girl who married the Marine who lived down the street when she was young and had four kids and later got divorced after she moved with her family away to Arizona where she eventually met another man and remarried. The second husband then took care of her when her mental and body functions were ceasing.  Even the last week of my aunt's existence her partner her second husband fought to keep her alive so they could be together a few more days.

Well to be a romantic dreamer here I want to imagine the first husband, my Uncle the muscled tattooed Marine dead a dozen years is consciously happy that his wife was well cared for in her final days and my Aunt a gentle soul sorta like St Francis of Assisi is drifting through deep space tonight conscious of the sound of birds singing and sunsets and dessert flowers blooming somewhere and sometime far away.

Who is to say non existence is just ceasing to be and that instead there are not a billion-billion possibilities of altered consciousness for us humans after death that no one alive or who ever lived can understand or accurately guess at or predict. Scientifically then, it seems to me if there are a trillion trillion galaxies of Matter out there, then being and non-being are beyond human understanding.

Each human soul is unique and each human soul is infinitely valuable before, during, and after Death.


The whys and wherefores of existence are beyond our comprehension; even in the imagination of the Poet, even during the speculations of the philosopher, even with the proofs of the scientist and even in the beliefs of the confidently Religious.