— पांच हजार चार सौ सत्तावन —
I mentioned in
Tuesday's post that I only learned from Jennifer on Sunday morning that Aunt Raenae was in hospice care, and learned Tuesday morning that she had stage 4 liver cancer.
It was Valerie I heard from early yesterday morning, via text:
Raenae passed away early this morning.
She was 75 years old.
There was a time when that might have seemed a fairly standard age for someone to pass away, but it doesn't really feel that way now. Even though, strictly speaking, it kind of still is:
average life expectancy in the United States had a pretty notable drop after the pandemic, down to 76.3 years in 2021 from a high of 78.8 years in 2019. Now, that averages both men and women, and women live longer: even in 2021,
live expectancy for U.S. women was 79.3 years. Aunt Raeae was four years younger than that. Plus, as I noted in my post on Tuesday, all of my grandparents died well into their eighties, so it's a bit of a shock even when someone dies in their seventies.
The bigger thing in this case is that Uncle Paul and Aunt Raenae died two years in a row. My dad was the youngest of five, and barely more than two years ago all five of them were still around. Now there are three.
Another surprise came yesterday: how quickly the turnaround is for her memorial gathering, which, like Uncle Paul's last year, will be again at the Mason Lake Recreation Center not far from Shelton. Apparently Aunt Raenae's family wanted it to be on Thursday next week, and why they deliberately chose midweek, I have no idea. Jennifer, who was asked to make the reservation (which she had to pay $200 for, because she didn't buy a pass this year, having had no plans for a family picnic this year), just texted me,
That's when they asked me to do it. I am assuming "they" referrs to Toni and James.
Jennifer also texted at another point,
They said they would get to me with a time frame but knowing that family it will be late. But! James had the Facebook invite page sent out by about 10:00 last night, all of about two hours after that text from Jennifer. So, he was actually pretty on it. The intent was to make it an all-day thing so people can drop in whenever they have time, and the time frame on the Facebook invite is noon to 8:30 p.m., 8:30 being when the park closes.
I've been a little bit anxious about going, just knowing my cousin Troy will be there, as I noted already in Tuesday's post. I was talking to Amanda about this stuff this morning, and she brought up something I can't believe had not yet occurred to me: I have every right to be there no matter what, but certainly if I was invited—and having gotten the Facebook Event, I literally was. Plus, Jennifer's probably right that there will be so many people there I can pretty easily avoid him if I have to. It may not even be that big a deal. I have no idea. That letter I got was fifteen years ago, after all. That's a long time.
My point is, I'm basically settled on going now. I sent out the Outlook calendar event to notify coworkers I'll be leaving the office early, at noon, on Thursday next week. As I already messaged to James, I'd prefer not to miss it. And I'd hate to have all this pictures from other memorials but not this one. That would be dumb.
— पांच हजार चार सौ सत्तावन —
— पांच हजार चार सौ सत्तावन —
I seem to be the one who largely keeps Valerie in the loop on a lot of family events like this. She actually drove down to Aberdeen to see Aunt Raenae one last time on Wednesday. She did send me this kind of heartening text on the same day:
It was really hard to see her like that. I wanted to let you know, though, that they all enjoyed watching videos last night, the ones that you put together over the years with Auntie June and Uncle Bruce [my grandparents, Aunt Raene's parents]
. Apparently Raenae was alert enough to laugh along with some of them last night. So that was cool to hear.
Back in the nineties and early aughts, people were consistently annoyed by my widespread use of camcorders. People tend to really appreciate all that footage I have now.
Anyway, whether Valerie can make it back for the memorial is somewhat up in the air. By sheer coincidence, Thursday next week is also Uncle Imre's 91st birthday. She's going to talk to him and see if he might be up for doing a birthday celebration another day and riding down with her for the memorial. Certainly lots of family who will be there will love to see him.
I had asked if there was any chance if I could hitch a ride with her if she does go, and that was when she said it's Uncle Imre's birthday. And if she does go, she'll be coming down from his house in Port Townsend rather than crossing the ferry from Seattle coming from Bellevue. So, my hitching a ride is really up in the air at the moment. I'd love to not have to drive myself, but, Shobhit can take the bus to work that day if absolutely necessary.
So anyway, Aunt Raenae and this memorial gathering has been top of mind the last day or so. I otherwise spent the evening at home alone last night while Shobhit was at work. I finished my "
All Albums by Year" collection on Flickr, which will make it a lot easier to navigate to certain photo albums of the past, depending on what I'm looking forward and how non-intuitively they are organized otherwise. It was interesting to see that, until 2019, the record number of photo albums in a given year was 2006, with 96. The year 2019 broke the record with 108 albums, which again was broken by 2022 with a pretty significant hike, to 129.
As long as I was messing around in my Flickr account, I added just a couple of shots to an album I've maintained for a couple of years just to crack myself (and occasionally Toni and James) up: "
Aunt Raenae Eating and Sleeping." I think I'll wait a while before sharing that to, say, the family group chat.
I also spent some time just reading my library book, which I very rarely do at home. Even though the air quality was in the "Moderate" range, the temperature was so perfect, I went up to the condo rooftop deck to read for a bit. Since I was up there, I also took a
couple shots of the westward view toward the city skyline, which now also shows the top few floors of Pride Place six blocks away, into which Laney will move in November. I texted them to Laney and she took the zoom shot and posted it to her own Facebook page to share.
Shobhit got home around 9:45, having asked me to heat up some parathas and leftovers for him, which was ready when he got home. We watched this week's episode of
Reservation Dogs before I went to bed.
— पांच हजार चार सौ सत्तावन —
[posted 12:35 pm]
