charlz_lynn | Amelia Helmboldt

My Great Aunt Mimi died last night.

Aunt Mimi has always been a crazy old bat. I say that with a lot of love. The story is that she was abducted around age ten, for many days. When she came back, she was never the same. Marbles asked me today if she was ever in love. I don't know the answer to that, and I suspect the real answer is that she was only ever in love with Jesus. She wore laminated pictures of Jesus, stories of sightings in the modern day (or 1900...), stories of The Virgin appearing in the clouds... around her neck. Always, so many of these pictures. "This is a real photograph of Our Lord," she would tell me when I was a child, and then we would go into the little room, in the dark, and pray. She pressed rose petals in newspapers and laminated them in these cards, put them on chains, and wore many of them at a time along with up to ten or twelve rosaries around her neck. All the time. She got in trouble for painting saints in the cemetery, just like Maude (of Harold and - ).

Aunt Mimi spent the whole day yesterday at my Grandma Bell's house, with her last two living siblings. Uncle Gerald lives in Utica, and my Aunt Sandra and her husband went down and got him. They spent the day like most Sundays at Grandma and Grandpa Bell's; dinner at two, food covering the table all day, people in and out, cards in the evening (not Aunt Mimi's... she's never been quite well enough to play cards). Then Grandma took her back to the home. They called about fifteen minutes later to tell her Aunt MImi had died.