By Ashley Ledford

     I don’t remember my Aunt Betty. It’s been over a decade since I last saw her. She came up from the nursing home in Thomasville for a family reunion or perhaps just a random visit. She’d been living with Parkinson’s for the past decade or so but was otherwise healthy. At least until she died on Friday. Nobody seems to know the cause. And nobody seems to care.

      She’s actually my half-aunt, my mom’s half sister. When their father died, Betty was in her thirties, Mom was 11, and for some reason or another, Mom went to live with Betty until she married my father at age 19. I’ve never gotten the forward, and I’ve gathered only bits and pieces of the actual story of Mom’s rearing, but I like to think of my mother as modern-day Cinderella. There wasn’t an evil step-mother, but Betty was apparently all three step-sisters rolled into one. Mom doesn’t hate her. I’m not sure my mother is capable of hating anyone. But she certainly doesn’t look back on her adolescence with fond memories. And she didn’t cry when she heard the news about Betty.

      In fact, no one who knew Betty seems to have anything nice to say about her. Her eldest son, when told, responded with, “So?” And while her youngest son, the beneficiary, hasn’t been indifferent to her passing, the funeral arrangements are interrupting the construction of his summer home. The only person who was at all affected by Betty’s death is her grandson, the son of her youngest son, and even he isn’t distraught. Her funeral arrangements caused a large amount of fuss and irritation because she didn’t have the insurance she claimed to and there seems to be a bit of a mix-up about the burial process. Thus, most of the cost for this woman’s funeral is coming straight from her youngest son’s pocket.

     “Even dead, she’s still screwing people over,” my dad said when Mom told him.

     Apparently, there’s not much else to say about Betty.

     But I have to marvel at her, at the audacity of spending more than seven decades intentionally infuriating those that should have been closest to her. She had four whole siblings and at least two half-siblings. Add to that her children and her sibling’s children and everyone’s grandchildren, and she didn’t have to spend her last few years alone, to die unloved in a nursing home bed. But she did. And I have to wonder if that’s the way she wanted it. If the teenage girl in the photograph, sitting on the hood of someone’s car, smiling as if she held the secret that would enable her to rule the world, wanted to be the shriveled old woman guarded in her bed by rails staring at the empty guest chair day after day after day.

     Mom tried to call her several times the week before Betty died, but nursing home’s service kept disconnecting the call, and when it did go through, the phone line wouldn’t stretch into Betty’s room. It was as if she was completely cut off from the outside world. But was it the world’s doing, or her own? Perhaps the smile she wears in the photograph tells not of a way to reign over the world, but the secret to sending it away. If so, did the results support the smile?

     I won’t attend the funeral. The ritual of staring at dead relatives is unnerving. But I will be curious to hear what the preacher has to say about such a bitter woman. After all, it’s impolite to speak ill of the dead, even if ill is the way she wanted to be remembered.

     Ashely