Why can’t I?

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . November 24, 2009 . 4:33PM

My aunt passed in October of 2007. I wrote this in June of 2008. I’m still coping with her unexpected death and writing about it here is probably going to upset some people, but my hope is that it will help some people that are struggling with the death of their loved ones as well. If I can do that, it’s worth the fallout. I remember her most often around the holidays, where she is sorely, sorely missed.

June 2008

Sometimes I think I’ve accepted my aunt’s death. Sometimes I know I haven’t. One of the last and best memories I have of her was when she and my whole family (Leon, Adrian, Olivia and Mom) went to Gatlinburg for a week. Besides listening to her snip at my mom while she smoked cigarettes and talked about drinking coffee with Adrian, we also wandered around the town.

I love Gatlinburg for many, many reasons. Mainly, though, when I enter the Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg area I am filled with a sense of well-being that I don’t usually experience elsewhere. The beauty and serenity of the mountains there fills the empty spots I try so hard to hide in my life.

I didn’t know that the week spent there would be one of the last times I would spend time with my aunt. Traveling makes me irritable, crabby, and hard to get along with. I hate change. I long for a stable routine. What this means is that going on a trip is generally going to make me unhappy and snippy at some point even though I could be enjoying myself immensely.

After a particularly hard day of dealing with one another, we had all settled in at a hotel near the aquarium. One of the features of this particular hotel was its offering of karaoke on the weekends and we were there on a weekend. Anyone that knows Leon and I knows that we like to sing. Neither of us is as good at it as we used to be, but it increases our mood and decreases our stress. We made our way into the smoky karaoke bar area and after being surprised by a co-worker (who had no idea I was going to be there that weekend and vice versa) we settled down to watch some truly marvelous and truly awful karaoke.

Selection was slim as I am no good with “old school” country music and being Gatlinburg, TN, the majority of the music was such. They did have “My Ding-a-ling,” which will crack up several members of my family that remember when Mikey, Jeremy, April and I discovered the song at a young age. I wasn’t going there. We’d just bought one of the Karaoke Revolution games and it had the song “Why Can’t I” by Liz Phair on it. I thought I was somewhat rehearsed in it and wouldn’t feel completely inept, so I signed up to sing it.

I’ve always had stage fright. Even when I was required to be on stage due to extra curricular activities, I barely held it together. I never got solos in choir because of this fear. It made me shaky. Actually, I probably was quite terrible and that contributed to the lack of solo time, but the shaky voice was right up there. I digress.

As I was singing in the smoky bar, I noticed my aunt wander in and sit next to Leon happily smoking a cigarette. What made me laugh was that later she said, “You were so good I had no idea it was YOU on the stage.” Well, ok.

The rest of the week was memorable and I have some amazingly funny pictures. Later, I remembered that Gatlinburg was special to Penny because she got married there. She loved it there.

Tonight, I was thinking about her. Every now and then I put her name in a search engine. The only thing that comes up is notice of her death or memorial. It reminds me that it really happened. I remember how she looked the last time I saw her–but it wasn’t her. Those that don’t believe in a soul have never seen a beloved, fiery-spirited aunt lose her spark. The soul IS real.

I think of her often at night, when the house is quiet and I’m alone with my thoughts. I googled her, yet again, and realized that I was having a physical response to this. I got tense and shaky, but didn’t know why. And then I realized that Why Can’t I was playing on the tv. It was completely random, but I have to wonder about these things. Since that night, I’ve associated this song with her…

My faith is probably not as strong as it used to be. I spend a lot of time wondering about God and Earth and why things exist the way they do. Most of my thoughts center on a place outside of Earth and where people exist when they are gone. My beliefs about death and the afterllfe are conflicted.

So, since I’m human, I put my faith in something that knows more than me and choose where she is based on my heart and not my head.

For me, my Aunt is and will always be in Gatlinburg. She was with me there when we ran in the middle of a thunderstorm up a hill for 3/4 of a mile to get the car with her cursing mom the whole way there while I tried not laugh for fear of passing out. She’s in the aquarium where we made comments about crabs doing illicit things. She’s in the smoky karaoke bar where I sing to her without her realizing it’s me. She’s terrified on the skylift but dealing with it by smoking. She’s resting by the stream that we watched our first day there. Yes. That’s where she is.

Why can’t I breathe whenever I think about you?