My mother died 11 years ago today. It wasn’t unexpected. A reoccurrence of the breast cancer we thought she’d beaten popped up late in October of 2012 and it had metastasized. We knew she didn’t have long.

Last night I talked to one of my cousins for the first time in a while. The circumstances were not a good one. The last relative of my parents’ generation had passed. My Aunt Vi was 92. She was my father’s baby sister. She was also my godmother. 

The earliest memories I have of my Aunt Vi were going to her home in Smithtown, NY. It was a large house compared to our tiny cape-cod-style home, and it had a pool in the backyard! I don’t remember actually going in the pool that often, but it seemed like a world away from the crowded homes where I was. I adored my Aunt Vi and my Uncle Tony. When you’re a child, life seems so simple. I’d later learn things about my Uncle that weren’t so nice. They divorced when I was fairly young, and I was brokenhearted.

But my aunt was in my life a lot. My father and Vi were close. She also stood up for me to their mother – my grandmother – when she said something terribly hurtful. We were out at Aunt Vi’s apartment for a holiday – probably Easter, although I don’t know for sure.  We’d brought my grandmother on my mother’s side with us and the two grandmas were talking while I was sitting with them, reminiscing about the old days. My father’s mother brought up two boys that had been my father’s best friends growing up. With me sitting right there, she said “It’s funny how the three of them never had any children.” I was stunned and silent until we got home later that night, then told my parents about it, ending with “I guess I know where I stand now.” My father was furious and blasted his mother. In typical German style, she wouldn’t apologize, but whatever went on between them, she turned to my Aunt Vi for support. Vi called my Dad to try to figure out what was going on, and when my Dad told her, she backed me up, saying her mother shouldn’t have said that.

Hey, I have a German mother too, who wouldn’t apologize when she said or did something wrong. I know what it’s like. It can be hard to stand up to that. It’s one thing I made sure not to pass on to my kids – I made my own mistakes. I loved my Aunt a lot for that.

I sat here last night digesting the news. When I talked my cousin, I said “it’s hard to lose your mother.” It is. It’s also hard to lose the last bit of the generation that’s older than you. You start out life with grandparents, and sometimes great-grandparents in your life. My mother’s father died before I was born (same day as JFK). I don’t have any real memories of my father’s father, except the morning he had his heart attack standing in my parents’ bedroom while my father dressed to go out to Mastic where he was in the hospital. I don’t remember the funeral at all, so I don’t know if I went or not. I’m leaning towards I didn’t. I think I was 3 at the time. My father’s mother died in 1988. We’d had a strained relationship after “the incident” and I didn’t feel the need to see her after I felt she didn’t see me as really a part of the family. My mother’s mother died in 1993, just before my wedding.

Then you have your parents. They become the “older generation” and it feels like there’s a buffer present there, between you and the end of your life.  I raised my kids and kept an eye on my parents. I knew that eventually, being an only child, there would be a big burden on me and tried to prepare for it. Nothing prepares you for losing your mother, though. And then I lost my father a little over two years later.

I’d lost my Uncle, my mother’s brother, a few years before her. When you become an adult you find out people have feet of clay, and I learned that about my Uncle, so there was no love loss there when he died. His wife, my mother’s sister-in-law, died the same year that I lost my mother and my daughter, so I was pretty numb by the time that news came down the pipe. I loved my Aunt Ruth as well. She was, like my mother, much a victim of the time she was raised in, for better or worse.

Still, even after my father passed, there was my Aunt Vi. With her passing, my cousins and I are truly now “the older generation.” They are mostly Boomers, while I’m a Gen-Xer. My Aunt was old enough to remember my father enlisting in the Navy during World War II, even if the soldiers of that era were older than her. My father served at the tail end of the war, just driving around the Naval bigwigs in San Francisco, where he was stationed. He had an issue with his eyesight and normally would have been 4F, but desperate times gave him a support role in Naval operations. I imagine seeing her big brother go off to war was a scary thing for my Aunt when she was young.

It’s estimated that only 122,000 World War II veterans are still among our population. That’s a bit of a startling number, when I think about my father being born in 1926 and his service was at the tail-end of the War. Those survivors still with us have to be close to 100.

It’s hard to lose your parents. It’s hard to face that you are now “the older generation” even when you don’t feel like it. It’s hard to see those who can testify about our history disappearing.