Everyone should have an Aunt Betty, especially when times are as crazily uncertain as they currently are here and around the globe.
About 25% of the world’s population live in areas affected by conflict, and the U.S. president has irresponsibly initiated wars with both Iran and the Pope. We also unfortunately have a secretary of defense who doesn’t understand how global energy markets work (or much else, other than cock-of-the-walk posturing), so, yes, let’s celebrate the sane and the positive. Let’s celebrate Aunt Betty.
Everyone should have an Aunt Betty in their life, even if they’re not a blood relation, yet resemble the perfect Aunt Betty-ness of mine. My Aunt B was the embodiment of purpose, service and an endless supply of ornery-ness and joie de vivre. We sang together in November when I last visited her in central Florida, five months before her death on Good Friday; if she had been physically able, she would have joined me in dancing around the room; instead, she laughed and sang along. We both knew it was likely my final visit with this special, beloved human.
Yes, everyone should have an Aunt Betty in their life and if they’re lucky, they will or do. We actually had three Aunt Bettys, total, in my family — but she was THE Aunt Betty, my mother’s younger sister and a constant, life-long source of hilarity, activity and stubborn, eye-rolling contradiction. The Aunt Betty was the sole surviving member of 12 “originals,” the Byrnes siblings, and yes, they were all deeply original, unique, complicated humans.
There was never a time when Aunt Betty did not want to laugh, dance, sing, meet new people, spend time with family or hold babies. There was never a time when she wasn’t assessing people’s health and well-being, including their mental health. A nurse and nurse educator to her bone marrow, for more than 30 years in retirement Betty volunteered in her local emergency room, as an EMT, and at the hospice she helped found. Aunt Betty was purpose made manifest, and a powerful, celebratory force for good. I will miss her terribly. I feel immense relief her suffering is over.
She celebrated her 95th birthday mid-March; several weeks later she spent a single week in hospice care followed by a peaceful death in bed after 12 months of having stepped down into the nursing home within her planned, independent(ish) living community. She had long been an ambassador there, volunteering to show families and individuals around the various amenities and steps of the facility. Aunt Betty loved being an ambassador, because if Betty had done this, made this decision, chosen this way of living (and dying), so, by gum, should you! Betty was opinionated, strong-willed and determined; she was led by devotion and her fierce intellect. Her seven brothers appropriately nicknamed her Sarge, yet like many nurses and medical professionals, Betty was deeply pragmatic. She’d seen it all.
When I visited her in Florida, which I did almost annually for the last 50 years, she inevitably asked me what my relationship was with God, occasionally before I’d even sat down upon arrival. As an atheist, darling Auntie, I don’t have one. My refusal to acknowledge an imaginary sky-friend-slash-boss distressed her, as one of her former lives was as Sister Mary Julia, a Franciscan nun; she kicked the habit in 1968. She remained, however, deeply devoted to her church. Okay, Sarge, but for me, no thank you very much.
While Betty always defended her faith, she did get that, for me, any church that codifies women as second-class citizens within its ranks was not going to fly; that aspect of her church bothered her, too (Sarge would have made an excellent Pope, actually). Betty was devout and loyal, however, habit kicked or not, forever a team player once her team was chosen; Catholicism, like being Irish, was her team, and without a doubt the best team around. But, Betty, aren’t we — the Byrnes’ — equally German? Let’s not go into that! Yet while I didn’t believe in her God, I sure believed in Aunt Betty.
After leaving her order at nearly 40 years old, Betty married and was widowed twice; both men were Catholic Ohioans; she’d spent a handful of years teaching ER nursing at Case Western Reserve University. Whenever I visited, Betty went off to mass with whichever of her husbands was still standing or as a widow on her own while I surreptitiously cleaned and decluttered their semi-detached home and, later on, apartment. Watching Betty or one of two very old men trip and fall over clutter was not happening on my watch — not more than once. She (mostly) didn’t notice. When she did, she learned there’s more than one non-commissioned officer in the family.
We should all have — or be — an Aunt Betty.