Personal: October 2002 Archives

On Sunday, September 22, my family and I attended the wedding of a cousin in Seattle. Last night, September 30, I got a phone call from my parents to tell my that my great-aunt Phyllis (generally referred to by everyone around her as "Phys") had been hospitalized for an aneurism and was unconscious. She died later on in the night, at eighty.I say "unexpected" because she was the most vigorous eighty-year-old you ever saw. She danced at her great-niece's wedding, as she had danced at many occasions before that. Earlier that day, we all went sailing around Puget Sound on her son-in-law's boat (which he had recently inherited from his father, who had passed away suddenly in Portugal three months previously — and yes, we talked about that on the boat!) Phys was a busy woman. Last weekend, she talked about how she and Dick, her live-in boyfriend, had season tickets to the symphony, for which they would regularly drive down from Bellingham to Seattle. (She estimated that between the symphony, her family, and other things, she was in Seattle three days a week!) Lately, the 1 1/2-hour journey had become a little scary to do at night, so they'd changed their tickets to daytime performances, but as far as I know, that was one of the few curtailments to her activities!) She also was happy to hop on a plane, whether to her condo in Hawaii, or to the Bay Area to visit my grandmother (and, the last time, to attend my grandmother's memorial service in the back yard of their house.)She was also a wonderfully good-humored woman. Since I only saw her a week ago, I can still clearly picture her big grin and infectious laugh. She could laugh at situations that would give other people fits. When her youngest daughter got married nine years ago, Phys woke up on the wedding day to find that one eye was totally swollen. Luckily Lisa's intended was an eye doctor and was able to come to her aid. "I'm so lucky — a lot of use you'd be to me if you were a gynecologist!" quipped Phys. Well, I suppose eighty isn't exactly young, and I'm glad she had a good life, but I still wish she could have had more of it!