Sad News Today

Today I received two letters by snail mail informing me of the death of my Auntie Martha on January 15th. I use the term 'Auntie', technically she's a cousin, my mother's first cousin. My gran had a really cool sister called Auntie Mary, whose daughter was Martha, also generally a really froody person. she was an only child as was my mam and they lived just round the corner from each other as children, although Martha was five years older, so even though long before I was born she moved away to the Deep South we saw her every now and then and were kept up to date with what was going on with her branch of the family.

I liked Auntie Martha, she was very different from my mam, she and her husband were really cheerful. She also was close to her adult daughters, as far as I could tell I haven' t seen her since things went pear shaped with my mam in 2004 (how would I explain that?!) and any older woman who keeps in touch with adult kids is automatically raised to heroine status in my eyes! She also has the 'family name', the Christian name of her grandmother my great grandmother and coincidently one of Dad's great grandmothers, which we chose for our first daughter because I have always liked it.

I knew it wasn't good news when there was a letter on the mat this morning in my mam's handwriting. She sends very formal birthday cards to us all, with cheques in them for the kids, and that's it for communication. The last time I wrote to her asking to meet was March 2006 and it was answered with a firm 'no', so its not likely she'd be writing to change her mind and ask to see us. There aren't any birthdays approaching so I automatically ran through people who could have died in my head. I was gutted when it was Martha, she is one of the few blood relations I had that I could say 'This is my relative!' and feel proud.

I turned to the other letter once I had headspace to, it was in unfamiliar handwriting, my mam's writing being on the first completely distracted me for the first half of the day. It was the same news again - this time from Martha's daughters. This was a shock, I never expected that! They were explaining that they didn't know I didn't speak to my mam until they saw her at the funeral last week (she'll have painted me as the spawn of the devil to them I guess) and so they were writing to let me know. How nice of them, they didn't have to do that. I really appreciated it. I'll be sending them a card pronto telling them I liked their mum.