My Great Aunt was born in Poland in 1914 on the eve of the First World War. By all accounts, there was nothing remarkable about her life.
She never married, never had children. She never went abroad. She flew on a plane only once in her life. She never went to college. She never learned how to drive. She lived in the same apartment her entire life. She worked as a postal clerk for nearly 40 years, never had a career. She never marched in a rally. She never joined a cause. She lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland and through the post-war Stalinism; she was neither a collaborator nor a hero.
My Great Aunt died in 1998 at the age of 84. At first, I did not believe she had died. She told me she would live to a 100, and I believed her.
I often think about the last six years of my Aunt’s life when she lived alone and only rarely left her apartment. By then, she had developed advanced coronary disease, and she suffered from debilitating pain. Every moment free of pain became her raison d’être, the force that sustained her.
She lived, it seems, with more Life than others I have known, people with aspirations, ideologies, and the means to pursue their muse, ever did. She lived a simple Life. And with her simplicity and her grace, she had the ability to make this world more beautiful.
My Aunt started every morning by opening all the windows – her apartment went all the way through – even on the coldest winter days to feel the air, to partake in the life of the city. Then she made tea, tea so strong no one else could stomach it. The leaves sat at the bottom of the glass, taking in water and rising half way the glass’s height. Tea was my Aunt’s only vice. She showed me once a photo of herself in her early 30’s with an unlit cigarette in her mouth. She seemed a bit embarrassed and yet emboldened by her youthful indiscretion as if the picture showed her dancing half-nude in vaudeville. I think coffee intimidated her.
After an hour-long ritual of breakfast, she had a whole day ahead of her, yet another day, exactly the same as the previous one. She left her apartment only once or twice a month. For all practical purposes, she was trapped in it. She was not an intellectual who could live the life of the mind, and she was not particularly introverted. And yet she was never bored, never stir crazy.
My Aunt often wished she could still go out, run a few simple errands, but having to climb the stairs to the fourth floor became an ever more daunting task. I remember walking up the stairs with her. It took about 40 minutes. She stopped every few steps as the pain seized her. She weathered it with stoicism, but standing in the cold staircase – it was cold even in the summer – she longed to be back in her apartment where she could lean against her old coal-burning tile oven, converted in the 1950’s to an electric radiator. The oven gave her strength. It had become a friend of sorts.
The hardship of the stairs did not deter my Aunt as much as it should have. Once in a while, she would present me with a book or some other small gift for one of the myriad of gift-giving occasions she liked to invent – mid-terms, first day of spring, or someone else’s birthday. “Thank you, who picked it up for you?” Poland was not introduced to the world of mail order catalogs till the late 1990’s. “Oh, I did, just the other day,” she would say with feigned casualness. The thought of my frail old Aunt wondering the old medieval streets – did she actually take the street car? – made me ache. “Please call me next time.” I never understood why she would think of doing such things. I just never understood.
My Aunt spent many afternoons and evenings crocheting. She did not crotchet to kill time. To her, it was not a project or something to do. She liked it. She found joy in watching the simple white thread turn into beauty. It had a live-giving quality. Her doilies and curtains were exquisite, made with an almost obsessive attention to detail. In fact, they were perfect. She spent weeks on a doily, months on a curtain. She never finished as much as a hot pad in a single evening. She had no notion of efficiency or an acceptable margin of error. If she made a mistake, she started over. She did not want the beauty of her creations to be diminished.
My Aunt gave away every doily and every curtain she ever made. Every piece was a little token of love, a little piece of her world, so beautiful and exquisite. It is only after her death that I understood why did not keep them. She did not need to.
She also had a great love for plants. Every spring she turned her small balcony on a noisy city street into a miniature nature preserve. In early March my Aunt filled plastic yogurt containers she collected in perpetuity with soil and began to plant seeds according to a schedule she devised every year. She harvested most of the seeds from her own plants the previous year. Quickly, her second bedroom turned into a nursery with plants sprouting out of 200 neatly labeled yogurt containers – on my Great Grandfather’s oak desk, on bookcases, picnic tables and even on a spare bed she covered with a plastic tarp of some sort. In late spring she began to replant the sprouts to outdoor containers – big round ceramic pots clustered in the corners of the balcony, rectangular green plastic tubs pushed against every flat surface, planters hanging off the rail, and miscellaneous pots with experimental trials all over. In the back of the balcony, against a false wall, she planted vines. So the balcony was jam-packed with plants – pansies, marigolds, geranium, petunias – the leaves and the flowers quickly spilling from one container to another so that one could no longer discern the boundaries between individual plants, no surface left bare except for a narrow six-foot long path that led, through the garden, to a deck chair she placed just before the vines. My Aunt spent hours sitting in that chair, often crocheting, often just watching the plants breathe life. When we visited in the summer, she insisted that we sit on the balcony, one person at a time. She pointed out discoveries she had made earlier in the day – an unusual shade of pink, a budding flower, or, sadly, a hint of autumn in the leaves. She found these discoveries endlessly fascinating.
Throughout the day my Aunt collected water in one-pint glass milk bottles; she did not have the strength to fill them all at once. After sunset, she carried them one by one to the balcony to water the plants. The bottles were quite heavy, so the entire process took at least an hour. That never discouraged her. She felt that the price she had to pay was small.
My Aunt did not have the attitude of someone with nothing better to do, someone with nowhere to go. She loved life with quiet unadulterated passion. She did not love her life. She just loved life. She did not consider herself unusual, on a mission from the Carpe Diem Gods. She just was. Indeed, she was the greatest lesson of all.
My Aunt could watch her plants for hours; she could crotchet for hours for indeed she did have all the time in the world. In her place, time did not exist. It is only in her place that life was not ahead of me for once and I was not trying to figure out my relationship to time. In my Aunt’s world, I told my Father, there were three hours between 3 and 4 pm. Until, one day, her world ended. I was in my Aunt’s apartment for the last time on the day of her funeral. And, for the first time, I saw it for what it was – a dusty old place cluttered with big blocks of furniture, some tacky paintings and a lot of empty plastic yogurt containers. And then I knew she was gone.
