Foothills of Childhood - Part 4

***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words.  It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail.  well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several.  So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here.  Okay?

Part 4

Uncle Fritz's wife, Bernie, was a beautiful natural looking lady, with hair to her knees, always braided up in a very Ukrainian style.  She was my favorite relative as a child.  I didn't realize until years later, after her demise, that Bernie didn't really like me.  To her I was just another unfortunate nuisance in her already too busy life of cleaning and waiting tables, cooking and taking orders.  Fritz was also a major autocrat and serious chauvinist, his way.  

Although blind, he still gave her orders on how to drive.  Finally one day when she was only 37 or 38, they left for California driving all the way, for a vacation visiting some of his siblings.  Bernie contracted pneumonia out there, or along the way, and died.  They had only been gone a number of days.  

I remember the body.  She was displayed at the home of her mother.  All of the family walking around eating and drinking around dead Aunt Bernie.  I was only 7.  I watched her.  I watched them.  And I listened very closely to everyone.  One of her sisters grabbed me and shoved me up to the casket and said, "Look, Susette, she is dead.  No more trips to Lake Erie."   Then she went on to say to someone else grown up and infinitely wiser than myself, "Kids, they just don't understand death, they can only equate it in terms of some kind of other loss."  I had been taught to never speak back of course, or speak up, so my anger burned quietly at the stupidity of this insensitive woman.  

I never cried.  My favorite grandmother died shortly thereafter, and my grandmother who was totally disabled and unable to speak also died next.  No, I never understood death nor did I cry about it.  Crying I left only for life and the death that drifts along with the living, the zombies.