ODE TO AUNT MILLIE

I want to preface this by telling you that I met my husband Joe while caring for his Aunt Millie while she was in the Cardiac ICU where I worked. If it were not for my encounter with Millie, Joe might never have found me. How empty my life would be without him; how grateful I will always be to Millie for bringing us together.

TRACES

She was a white haired women in bed 201 with tubes and machines connected to her

she wouldn’t sleep that night

she knew her body was failing her....

She fought the tubes and the sedatives and in her eyes I saw the battle.....

i saw a women

fighting to live ....

or

fighting to die......

i wasn’t sure which.

But i saw in her eyes the battle being fought........

A dying women who couldn’t speak to me through the tubes that kept her lungs full of air...........

yet as time would pass,

she would speak to me many times

She died a day later and left behind a husband......

a stubborn old German

who needed her more than even he knew.

I find Traces of her now and have come to know her....

this women in bed 201 I never knew.

I have come to know her in the things she left behind

I find her in the pictures - The 3 year old farm girl beside her brother,

the young bride in her 20’s who’s eyes look into the camera and shine with the hopes and dreams of a women with yet another 60 years of lifes’ journey still ahead of her.

I find traces of her in the books she left behind with the little hand-written notes made in the margins....

old letters written in 1943 to a brother fighting in the war.....

my fingers trace the stitching embroidered on the pillowcase she sewed in the 1950’s...

i take a trip with her through the Dakotas in the post cards and clippings from her trip there in the 1960’s.

I travel back further with her as my eyes read her fathers obituary....telling a story of a man with five children taken too soon from the family still young and in need of a father.

i come to know her strengths as i read and i touch the things she possessed in her journey through this life....

the journey i never really took with her but have traveled still.....

through the traces of what she left behind.

As i stare into the eyes of that 3 year old farm girl in the tattered black and white picture

i see too,

the eyes

of the old women in bed 201.

I once again see her battle being fought.

I think she knew her time had come yet she fought those machines that kept her alive. i think she was torn ....

between what lie ahead

and those she was leaving behind........

For it was just traces of things that she owned that she left beside lifes long road and not just the stubborn old German......

but the most treasured possession I found amongst her things was the man and the family she left for me

How can I owe so much....... to a women I never knew

and yet I feel i know all about her

All I can do to repay such a debt is to love and to take care of the Traces.......

the Traces of those she left behind.

Stormy Reiley

October 28, 2001

Mildred Reiley Pluemer

October 28, 1913-August 12, 1998