2001-09-14 - 11:04 p.m.

Aunt Annsie (1)

Today I got a couple more phone calls from the lawyer who informed me about the death of Aunt Annsie a couple of days ago. According to Annsie's wishes, she wants to be cremated and buried with her husband down in Arkansas. The problem is that in order to cremate someone you need the signature of the deceased's next of kin.

To my surprise, the lawyer indicated that Annsie's next of kin was the three of us kids: Harry, Janis and myself. As the eldest my signature apparently carries the most weight, so she told me she was sending some documents to me via Fed-Ex.

I was her next of kin, and yet I didn't even know she was dying. In the last letter I got from her, dated July 15, she mentioned that she was not feeling well, but it was "nothing fatal."

Obviously not. According to the lawyer, Annsie had been fighting cancer for quite some time. For whatever reason, she decided that I didn't need to know the truth.

Maybe she wanted to spare me knowledge, and she wanted to spare herself my pity. Or maybe she thought I would come prowling around looking for goodies in her will. I guess I'll never know the truth now.

Like I said, we are hardly a close family.

I've promised to tell Aunt Annsie's story here, but I've been debating exactly how to go about it. Where do I start? I feel like I don't have enough information, but I am unlikely to get any more now.

In the first couple days after I heard the news, I felt regret grip me like a giant fist. Why hadn't I written to her more often? Why didn't I work harder to repair our damaged relationship? And this was against the backdrop of an entire country in mourning after the attacks of Sept. 11.

However, the wise council of Lily and the Manager has persuaded me to some degree that I am being too hard on myself. I'm not all-knowing or all-powerful. Within the confines of the knowledge I had, I did the best I could. I played a bad hand the best I could.

Now if I could only believe that...

I'm going to start the story just two years ago, because that's where it really started for me.

In the early spring of 1999 I was astonished to get a letter from Aunt Annsie, my mother's only sister. Why was she writing to me? She and my mother hadn't spoken for over 15 years before Mom died in 1996. When I opened the letter I was doubly astonished. She had only just found out that her sister was dead, two and a half years after the fact.

Both Mom and Aunt Annsie were beneficiaries of a trust set up by my grandfather, their father. The trust had been split in half, which made life easier since the sisters weren't speaking to each other. While scanning some documents from the trust Annsie noticed something about the other half being dissolved. When she asked the Trust people why, she was told, to her shock, that her sister had died in 1996. Nobody had thought to tell her before then.

I was only mildly surprised to hear this. Having dealt with those trust people myself, I knew first hand how slow they were at relaying information. In fact, when Mom died I asked them to give me Annsie's address so I could write to her, and they refused to divulge it. Of course, I didn't press too hard, but I did make an effort.

The letter from Annsie went on to say how sorry she was to hear about Mom dying, and how filled with regret she was that she hadn't spoken to her for so long. She wanted to get to know her niece and nephews better, and to help us out if she could.

I thought that this was a gesture of extraordinary generosity. I had not actually seen Aunt Annsie since I was a little boy, 30 years previously.

So I started corresponding with her, trying my best to explain myself and what had happened to our family.

And somehow, it all went wrong.

Continued, tomorrow