My aunt Blanche remarried after waking up years earlier in bed with the body of my uncle who had not been easy to live with since teaching my cousin in the school playground’s twilight to bike he sped into a chain that flipped him on his head hard with losses of hearing, vision, mental acuity, and equanimity. I saw Blanche mornings of my visits sitting silently, stoically, solitarily, in her sewing room suffering the aftermath of frustrations and outbursts until he yielded. I stayed close enough to usher her wedding to the Palm Beach burgher who doted on Blanche in his declining years. I hosted their visit when I moved to Asia, Blanche stouter while Walter rather wizened. After a while she awoke to find herself a widow again, and half-a-world apart we lost track somehow for thirty years. Oh, I called when her elder son, like her husbands, passed away in his sleep. A mother, she averred, should not outlive her child. But life follows no rules, and last week, her younger, my itinerant cousin, the journalist, the drinker, died of liver cancer. Only because the obit noted his mother survived did I think to locate my aunt and call to hear her commit to sit now and work out how to go on and on through the rest of her nineties without husbands or boys but one remote nephew who promises to call from time to time.

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