MAE

An Essay by Jane Piirto

            I get home at 12:45 a.m. to see that one red eye on the telephone is blinking. One call. I rewind, wait for the pause, and listen: “Jane. This is your mother. More bad news. Your Aunt Mae died this morning.” An almost sleepless night as I wait for the world to wake up so I can all my mother back, my sisters, my kids, my cousins—what we do when deaths hit a large family.

            “We love you so much, Janie,” Aunt Mae said to me after Christmas dinner at the Red Lobster in Marquette, Michigan. Her last words to me. Aung Mae, 90, was my father’s sister, and I loved her very much. She was funny, outrageously frank, our family’s matriarch. Years pass into minutes as I think about old times. Mae’s only daughter, my cousin Suzanne, was nine months old when Mae’s first husband died. Our two families lived together at the time in Bremerton, Washington, where our parents did war work. Suzanne and I attended nursery school together.

            It is March now. The snow is deep this year, and unforgiving, the roads slippery, dangerous with the ice. Time and memories wind up in times when uncles and aunts filled the lit house with singing around the piano, when the brothers lined up in the sauna, six bald heads, the aunts gossiping about Aunt Lynn’s divorce, kids running through the house, the china cabinet rattling. In the kitchen, Grandma, massive, sits holding a white china cup caked with brown gravy, the holiday turkey in the oven of the old wood stove.

            Grandma and Grandfather Piirto came to Ishpeming, Michigan, Barnum Location from Ilmajoki in Ostrobothnia, Finland. Barnum Location meant the location and neighborhood grew up around an iron mine. Their first son became a dentist. The next six children were girls. Four were teachers, one went to beauty school, and Aunt Mae became a nurse. My father was the first boy after the six girls. Four more boys followed, twelve children in all. My father told me that Grandma would just have a child and go back to her duties—it was no big deal. Today, there are 25 of us first cousins—though we are getting long in the tooth–.

            A photograph from 1927 sits on my dresser: six Piirto sisters, six young women in cloche hats looking like flappers, lay coquettish on the grass staring into a camera, their life and children still unrealized. Now four of the sisters are dead, two are in rest homes, and only one Piirto brother is left. Time is breaking like this dawn, a gray rising as the cousins gather, slide into memory, pay respect to time. Aunt Mae was the sister who left Ishpeming to go to nursing school “down below.” “Down below” means the land of trolls, Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, as Upper Peninsula natives of the 1920;s called those unlucky enough to be born south of the Straits of Mackinac. Aunt Mae went to a Catholic nursing school in Detroit, and then settled in to work in a hospital in Ann Arbor before finishing her career as a nurse in the health center at Eastern Michigan University. Mae was always “spunky,” in my father’s phrase. She had her own mind and didn’t hesitate to show it.

            Daylight. I feel devastated. I hadn’t realized how this would feel, how important Mae was, still is, to me. I call my choir director to tell him I can’t sing this Palm Sunday, because my aunt has died. I shower and throw things into a suitcase when I hear the phone. It is my cousin Bette Lynn in Northville, Michigan. She says she will wait for me to pick her up on my way to Marquette. I fill my cat’s bowl and leave a note for my neighbor, who will feed him. I clear the kitchen and leave my town of Ashland, Ohio, 600 miles from my destination. Three hours later, I pull into Bette Lynn’s. a few minutes of conversation with her husband, who helps us load the car. We are off. It is good to see her. We talk as we drive along about the family, the aunts, the uncles, our children, of politics. Our fathers used to spend hours arguing in the sauna, out of the sauna. Bette Lynn is a conservative Republican like her school principal father, and I am a liberal Democrat like my union member welder father. The brothers-in-law battled for years over unions and the New Deal, over Eisenhower and Stevenson, over Wallace and Roosevelt. Over Clinton and Dole, if Bette Lynn and I would talk about this. But we don’t. Our fathers could remain friends and argue bitterly, but Bette Lynn and I ae women and we want to make nice. So we avoid this potential conflict.

            Ten hours later, as we pull into Marquette, it is snowing with snowbanks twelve to twenty feet high. Slick roads have caused an accident. We pass the flashing lights and confused drivers very slowly, the car swaying on the ice. “Respect the ice,” my father told me when he taught me to drive. I make this trip often, but usually watch the Weather Channel for days in advance to anticipate snowstorms, as I’ve had near-death experiences on the near-wilderness two-lane highways driving alone the 180 miles from the Mackinac Bridge to Marquette.

            We stop by Aunt Mae’s first. It is 7:30 and just getting dark. Our feet make slide marks in the new snow. Suzanne arrived from Boston days before and she answers the door almost before we knock. We hug and hold each other gratefully, then stamp the snow off our feet, move inside, and sit down in the familiar doily-covered furniture in the living room. Ray is here, Mae’s stooped and gentle husband. In the corner of the room I see the photo albums, the prosaic three-foot high stack of family chronicles—gatherings, visits, and smiling faces around party tables.

            Mae was the family photographer, and these arrays of photographs—polaroids, instamatics, box camera—have provided hours of family entertainment each time we got together.

            We begin to talk about Aunt Mae. Suzanne describes the last few hours when Mae lay stuck with tubes and plugged into machinery, how the doctors said they could keep her alive for a few days, but she was brain-dead, how Suzanne and Ray decided to let her go, and how each of them took one of Mae’s hands and watched the machinery as the flat line indicated that this earthly life was over. I say my Uncle Arvo, my mother’s brother, had pulled out his own plugs when he died in that same hospital, of pancreatic cancer just two weeks ago. “I’m glad we were with her,” Suzanne says. Her face is a little redder than usual, but otherwise she looks fine. I think of how Suzanne is always contained, a manager of multimillion-dollar commercial properties. Managing here as well.

            Except for an odd gesture. She leaves the room abruptly, returning with a heavy brown garbage bag. “Here, Bette Lynn. Take these clothes to Aunt Ty. My mother hardly wore them. I went through her clothes and have given most of them away, except for these. These are her best ones. Give them to Ty.” I find this strange. Ty lives in a rest home. She never dresses up. She rolls all her good clothes into wads, hides them in suitcases because she says she is afraid someone will steal them. Bette Lynn says nothing and accepts the clothes.

            We leave to drive the last twelve miles to Ishpeming. My mother is waiting, with meat loaf, wild rice, and wheat bread just baked. I say up to watch the local news, as is my pleasure when I come home, and this snow squall has put the annual snowfall inches over the record made last year.

            The next day in the funeral home, Bette Lynn, Mother, and I take awhile to muster our courage before going in. This will be hard. Looking down at Aunt Mae’s painted face. I understand why people open the coffin. It is so that the living can see that the dead are really dead. Our father lay in a closed coffin because he had wasted away so much, and perhaps I have never truly realized that he is dead because I didn’t see him painted up and powdered. My mother stands alone over there. I go to her. She puts her head on my shoulder, sobs. I wonder whether she is also thinking of my father.

            After the funeral home, we all go to the home of another cousin. It is the same each time the family gets together. The noise gets louder and louder as we eat the pizza and lasagna, with soft and hard drinks, getting to know one another again. Aunt Mae would have loved it, except that this time Ray sits stooped and confused at the round table. I sit sometimes silently, overwhelmed by the memory of the family times like this, knowing that whether I said one word of held forth for an hour, I am loved and in a family.

            “Here’s better off,” I overhear a cousin say about her son whose wife divorced him when he suffered a brain tumor. I hear echoes of the family’s talks about other members who have experience tragedy and come home. “She’s better off,” the aunts said in the mid 1950s about Aunt Lynn, who left her husband. “She’s better off” here with us, the family, who love her.

            The grace of this glow reminds me of childhood sauna Saturday nights at Grandma’s in Ishpeming when we cousins played, running around and screeching while our parents caught up on news and gossip. Now, fifty years later, we share pictures of children and grandchildren. I show the christening pictures of my granddaughter in the lace dress and bonnet I sewed. How beautiful my daughter is, and what a good-looking man my son-in-law has become. This ceremony is a wake, exactly that. We stay a-wake, redefining ourselves as cousins after the most  influential aunt to many of us, has died. We are here while she is back there at the funeral home in her red suit, her glasses perched on her nose above her closed eyes, the bruise on her forehead from where she took the fall that put her into the coma, delicately powdered-over beneath the feathered white hair, but still visible. Her small hands are folded over her stomach.

            Palm Sunday morning, the snowbanks are so high you can’t see the other side of the street from the front window. The backyard swing chains, mired, are embedded halfway up. The crotch in the apple tree barely shows above the snow. Indeed, the sky is blue, the sun bright and cold. The snow is so deep that the street, usually wide enough, even in deepest winter, for two lanes of traffic between the stone walls, is reduced to three ruts, the outside ones iced, the middle one shared by passing cars, as one car has to stop and park while the other carefully passes.

            We drive to the old family house, sold about ten years ago after Aunt Lynn died. The new owners have parked their rickety car in the plowed driveway. Smoke comes out of the old chimney. We take pictures in front of the huge snowbank which is the same color as the house with its gables, built by our grandfather in the Finnish style. I imagine I see Grandma Piirto rocking on the front porch, as she often did. We don’t stay long.

            We go to Marquette for an early brunch, and for a ride to see the blue ice on Lake Superior, and then stop to buy music by a local Finnish reggae group, “Conga Se Menne.” Then we go to the nursing home to visit Aunt Siiri, 95 years old. Siiri is the oldest girl. She is recovering from hip surgery, and her flat breasts and frail arms in her purple and white print silky dress show the struggle and her loss of vigor. A thin fine blue vein throbs beneath the white translucent skin of her forehead. But Siiri is improved now, as neat in appearance as ever. She repeatedly says she regrets that she doesn’t have any coffee to serve us. It’s a good sign. Siiri pulls up the lap robe to cover her bare toes in the cast propped up on a leg rest on the wheelchair. “I feel so empty.” We all agree we all do. We encourage Siiri not to try to come to the funeral, as she needs two trained attendants to move her. We won’t see her again, for three months later, Siiri is also dead.

            Back home, Bette Lynn tells Mother to look through the clothes Suzanne gave her, because they are sure to be too small for Ty. Mother tries on a houndstooth checked jacket bought last October in Boston, only worn a couple of times. It fits. I say I have heard that wearing the clothes of a dead relative makes you feel hugged by them. But we are all uneasy. Mother digs through the brown garbage bag and tentatively pulls out one or two other things, and then says, “I can’t do it. I can’t wear it.” I agree that I couldn’t either, and so does Bette, and though Suzanne is acting so calm and in control, the brown garbage bag freshly filled with the fresh clothes from the fresh dead is a sign she isn’t.

            The funeral director says, “You want to sit with the family, don’t you?” Seven rows of family. A lot on such short notice. In the back of us on both sides of the church are Mae’s and Ray’s friends. We have barely sat down in the church when the funeral directors wheel the closed coffin to the front, with its dove gray pearlized finish, a large bouquet of white carnations and red roses in ferns along the top. The service begins with Sibelius’ Finlandia chorus on the organ. The program says “March 24, 1997. A Celebration of the Life and Faith of Mae Suzanne Spencer.” During the prelude, I look around the old church noticing its simple white plaster, its dark brown carved beams, the cross suspended, the Old English stained glass windows, the faded purple and yellow Victorian-looking flowers through which the light of day surges.

            Lately, in my own middle-age, I have a love affair with old churches like this, comforting churches, a little dim, with worn places where hands gripped the backs through many Methodist hymns sung over the past century. Being Finnish, Mae was a cradle Lutheran, but she began attending the Methodist church with her husband Ed when she first married in 1940. The minister points us to the Words of Grace, greets us, and we stand and sing. “I love this hymn,” my mother says. I nod and as we sing, I hear the beautiful voice of my cousin’s daughter next to me. We all repeat Psalm 23. When the minister begins his sermon, he looks on us, Mae’s family, in the first seven pews, and tells us outright, “You are lucky. I look at this family gathered here to mourn your Mae, and all I can think is you are lucky. Many people don’t have what you have.” And I look around and know he is right. We are enfolded into the bosom of a large and loving family. And Mae was her generation’s main enfolder.

            Mae. The family’s memory carrier—old dates, family legends—what year was it Lynn was married? 1948? 1940? We ask Mother, and she can’t remember. We asked Siiri and she can’t remember. But Mae would have. Important family memories have died with this woman. After the sermon, the prayers, and the final hymn, the family files slowly from the church. The burial and committal service will have to be delayed because there is so much snow in the cemetery. In the basement of the church, the women have provided trays of food—noodles, jello, casseroles, date bars, and brownies, pink lemonade, ham and cheese on buttered rolls, coffee and tea. The family lingers for two hours before dispersing. We hug and circulate, and I tell everyone who will listen about my gratitude to the pastor for his insight. “You are lucky. To be in such a large and loving family.” We all agree. We feel enfolded. Mae and Siiri and Ty fill our thoughts, and as Bette Lynn and I drive back down south over the Mackinac Bridge, listening to the new CD and singing along in our similar cousin voices, Bette Lynn says, “You know why it’s so sad when aunts die?” It means we can’t be little girls any more. It means that now we are the matriarchs.”

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