By Holly Kozelsky
The aunts are being replaced.
It’s been a shocking couple of years in which one out of every single aunt/uncle pair in my family has passed away. First our family dealt with the mourning. And now as we mourn we also are hospitably accepting the new partners.
Our hippie aunt was replaced by a new-age artist. Our uptight aunt was replaced by an easy-going outdoorswoman. Our really, really!, uptight aunt so far is replaced by the couple’s fancy, groomed pedigreed dog.
On the other hand, the aunts who remain, who have each lost a husband, have a different approach.
The socialite aunt replaced her successful businessman husband with a series of 6-month around-the-world cruises. The calm, charming aunt replaced her husband with leisurely late mornings and relaxed suppers in a lovely new townhouse.
I practically felt whiplash seeing how quickly the uncles who became widowers moved on. They are happy and in love and have a spring in their step. They are trying new things they’ve never done before – one of them long hikes in the mountains, and the other, theme-decorated rooms in the lavish Victorian house they bought together: steampunk in one, Medieval castle in the other, fairies in a third.
It was obvious the uncles needed looking after. One had depended on his wife to pay the bills, and one of my sisters spent weeks teaching him how to use a computer and do banking and figure out what bills to pay and where to pay them. The other let the new live-in girlfriend completely handle the house decorations, meals and social life.
The third, who hadn’t much left his house in decades, showed up at holiday dinners with his large, exuberantly clumsy fluffy dog with the bow in her hair jumping up on everyone and bumping into everything. We were just all glad he left his house and joined us.
Unlike the uncles who outlived their wives, each aunt who outlived her husband has shown no interest whatsoever in getting involved with another man.
Perhaps their husbands were just so perfect that anyone following them would only pale in comparison.
Perhaps it’s that after being liberated from decades of cooking and cleaning up after someone else, freedom is just too darn enticing?
Then there were some widowed neighbors who told it like it was.
Mrs. Johnson did her duty by Carl, and after he died some other men came calling.
“I told them I’ve done had me a man and I don’t want no man!” she told me, laughing, that day she taught me how to haul over manure from the cow pasture in burlap sacks to dig into the dirt for our vegetable gardens.
Another lady I’m not going to name because some of you know her told me about what she told a widower who came calling after her husband had died: “I told [so-and-so] that if you want to come over here to take me out to dinner or the senior dance, that’s fine, but I’ve done my duty tending to a man and I’m not going to do anything that’s included in tending a man anymore.”
He accepted her terms, and there followed a friendship of several years that involved meals at Hardee’s, dates at the senior dances and her leaving her garbage bags under her carport for him to take to the trash.
Life goes on, in pairs, or independently.
