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For most of my life, Aunt Helen seemed younger than I was-at least in the ways that matter.
Chronologically, she was half a lifetime ahead of me. But emotionally, she didn't keep pace. She remained always guileless, trusting. So, so sweet. She was a looking glass through which I viewed my own coming of age - I watched my innocence fall away as hers remained intact.
Every trace of cynicism that took root in me stood in stark relief against her wide-eyed disbelief that bad things happen to good people…and, god forbid, to children.
Countless were the times I'd walk into my mother's house to find Aunt Helen sitting at the dining room table playing cards. Expecting her to greet me with a casual hello, I'd instead be confronted with a series of distressed, disjointed questions: "Oh…! did you see? How could they do that? What about the children? What's wrong with people?" It would take some back tracking and deciphering to get the whole story out of her, which was inevitably the latest reported tragedy on the local or national news.
Most of us, by adulthood have developed filters for such things. We hear the stories of heartbreak and sorrow, but we keep a proper distance. We differentiate between public and personal tragedy.
But Aunt Helen had no filters. She held things as they were given to her. Her heart seemed to feel the world's tragedies one by one, each with equal importance and gravity. For Aunt Helen, there was no shortage of grief to share, just as there was no shortage of love. We were all one.
And still, innocence aside, there was a mysterious "other" side to Aunt Helen that often made me wonder, if not for a fever, who she might have been.
There seemed to be a spring of knowledge and wisdom at her center that bubbled up at the most surprising times: some insight into human behavior; a blunt acknowledgement of the lamentable lack of decency in the world, a string of correct answers to Alec Trebek's jeopardy questions. How did she always manage to kick our butts in jeopardy?
There is a book I have loved since I was a child. It's called The Little Prince. It's the story of a prince from another planet and an airplane pilot from France who both fall to Earth and find themselves lost in the Sahara desert. The prince, though a child, is wise and soulful, and offers the pilot insight into the planet Earth and its inhabitants as only someone who's not of this world could.
As I think about the mystery that is Aunt Helen, a passage from that book keeps coming to mind. The pilot is recalling a moment spent with the little prince when they were thirsty and searching for water in the desert.
"The desert is beautiful," the little prince said.
And that was true. I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing, yet through the silence something throbs and gleams….
"What makes the desert beautiful," said the little prince, "is that somewhere it hides a well."
And I believe this is true of Aunt Helen. What made her so beautiful was that for all of her uncomplicated goodness, there was a mysterious well within her that was untapped, unknown, but full of such magical promise. It shimmered through. We felt its presence, but like all great mysteries, it was just beyond us.
In the story of the Little Prince, he finally finds his way out of the desert and back home to his planet among the stars.
Like the Little Prince, Aunt Helen has found her way back home, back to a place where, finally, she fully belongs, a place where we are all one.
And with us, she's left her mystery to hold.