Aunt Frances, Presente

My great-aunt recently passed away at 96 years old. Aunt Frances, I always called her, even though she was technically my grandmother’s sister—the eldest of the family. She was feisty and smart and lovely and talented, a matriarchal figure at every family reunion. While us kids spent most of those reunions splashing around the mountain creek (which she pronounced “crick”) and tumbling through the pollen-heavy September grass, we would always stop by her lawn chair for a bird-boned hug and a story of one of her past husbands, the three respective men she had fallen in love with then outlived to marry anew.

When I hear the word “moxie,” I think of her. She embodied the term, in her crisp shirts and flawless pantsuits she sewed herself. She was Appalachian through and through, with the thick accent and the skill for cooking up batches of calorific comfort food. Yet that did not mean she was conservative or close-minded. Instead, she was deeply loving and accepting.

You see, her granddaughter married a black man and had a mixed-race son. Aunt Frances’ son-in-law (father of this granddaughter), raised in the Jim Crow South, disowned his own daughter. She was dead to him, and her son did not—and never would—exist. Yet Aunt Frances—raised in that same Jim Crow South, in the deepest reaches of rural North Carolina—embraced her granddaughter’s new family. She loved her great-grandson and recognized him as her own flesh and blood, knowing full well the fallout she would face from her own relatives and from the larger society.

A woman born nearly a century ago, she was more open-minded than many people more “modern” in terms of their birth years have ever been. She inspired me with her stories, with her grit, with the softness of her hand touching my head as she told me she loved me.

She was also deeply Christian. In her last moments, as her younger sisters (now all grandmothers and great-grandmothers themselves) gathered around her, she asked for them to read the Bible to her. When she was finished, she told them that she was ready for Jesus to come and get her, because she was ready to go home.

Home. Aunt Frances, I pray that whatever happens to our souls when we die, and wherever we go, that you feel home. I don’t have the same security you did in believing in a specific afterlife, a certain heaven. But I know you, and your love, and I can feel it now, even with you having passed from this earthly life we experience. I was blessed to have known you, and you blessed our family by being part of it and by bringing love into it. Thank you, and amen.

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