by great-great nephew Eric Knecht
Those of you long removed from childhood may forget this, but when you’re very young, let’s say in the single digits, you classify all people into one of three groups: kid, adult, or, I’m sorry to say, old person. You can easily test me on this: grab any seven-year-old and ask them to distinguish the age of a 26-year-old versus a 46-year-old individual and they won’t be able to do it––each will simply show up on the child’s congenital radar as “adult” and not much else.
As we move out of childhood, of course, we all inevitably develop a sense of age and an awareness of nuance, and with it, we make more precise estimations––whether consciously or subconsciously––about how old the people around us are, and in turn, the way we should be speaking and interacting with them (for the most part, I don’t talk to twenty-somethings the way I do to fifty-somethings, and with fifty-somethings the way I do to eighty-somethings).
I bring this up not because I wanted to allow my dad the chance to mistakenly make a wisecrack about my usage of the word “congenital”, but rather because my dear Aunt Dora shattered this age-estimation idea to pieces.
When I was born, Aunt Dora was exactly 80 years old. In other words, and by the standards of a world that only she inhabits, she was just straddling the starting line of old age. More to the point, whenever I recall any memory of our time together, I suffer from the same dilemma as that of the seven-year-old child: in my mind Aunt Dora has no specific age, nor can I even begin to assign her one.
This is to say, that even as I grew increasingly aware of others’ age, and more generally, the temporal nature of all of our lives, Aunt Dora always seemed to exist in an alternate realm, a state of agelessness that defied the rules; she was a permanent fixture that overlooked the development process of all of us, yet somehow remained outside of its grip herself.
As a teenager, I used to go over her house to help with the lawn. I never once stopped to think how incredible it was to have an aunt in her late nineties that was still perfectly coherent––enough so to adamantly nag me as to whether or not I yet had a girlfriend. But I never really had a reason to consider the unlikelihood of her age, mostly because Aunt Dora never seemed to change, or from my naive vantage point, even grow older. As long as I could remember, she was always excited to see me, always interested in everyone’s news, and always offering me slightly burnt cookies (they were somehow still always very good). Aunt Dora being around to offer up these comforts seemed as certain as turkey on Thanksgiving, or my dad falling asleep in church––nothing short of immutable.
In many ways, Aunt Dora was as much a beloved relative as a part of our family identity and a symbol of its continuity. Having an aunt who was born with Teddy Roosevelt in the White House was a powerful reminder that you did not, and could not possibly, exist independent of those who came before you; she was a physical reminder of the long and enduring lineage of people who established the groundwork for the life we now take for granted, and who did so in a world that seems to exist purely as the stuff of textbooks and legends. To have had Aunt Dora in your life was to have known someone who was born disenfranchised, saw two world wars and came of age during Prohibition. Aunt Dora may have never driven a car, but the Model T wasn’t even popularized until well after she was born, so somehow, it’s easy to forgive her for this.
To lose someone like this is devastating. Aunt Dora was one of the sweetest, most kind-hearted and good-natured relatives I had or will ever have. But what’s more, her passing is a bucket of cold water on every naïve notion we have about constants and forevers; it’s an unfortunate reminder that no one truly lives outside the boundaries of life’s basic rules. Aunt Dora’s ability to trick me into believing she could, however, is perhaps the best indicator of how special she was and how I remember her: unwaveringly positive, pleasant, caring, concerned.
