The last one

I’ve been trying to write something – anything – since Saturday. Not happening. I’m completely blank.

It isn’t for lack of topics.

Presidential election. Global pandemic. COVID-19 resurging. The sorry state of Michigan football. As in, the entire state.

Maybe there’s just too much going on, and my brain is on overload unable to process everything.

Doesn’t matter. None of that matters to me right now.

We received some sad news Monday night.

My Aunt Nores died at her home in Pittsburgh. She was 96.

The last one.

If you believe in that sort of thing, which I do, the three Guella sisters – Enea, Elia and Nores – are back together again. The two older siblings probably greeted the youngest by handing her a Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky on the rocks and offering her a seat at a low-stakes poker game, already in progress, of course.

“Sit down, Nores. Eat something,” Enea, the oldest would say.

“About time you got here,” I can hear my mother, Elia, add.

Then, Nores would for the first time say up there what she had always said to her most beloved on earth: “A**hole.”

God, I loved that woman.

Last week, Aunt Nores fell trying to get out of bed. This was after she took a fall in August, fracturing her shoulder and pelvis. She ended up in the hospital and then a rehab facility.

Despite all of that, “the ol’ gray mare,” as she liked to call herself, was on the mend, surprisingly mobile using a walker and eating like there was no tomorrow.

Then, things began to change last weekend. She mostly just slept and wouldn’t eat.

On Sunday, her family called in hospice care. They rented a hospital bed. Nurses were on call. But Aunt Nores was restless and agitated and couldn’t sleep. The morphine drops gently placed under her tongue calmed her down, but not enough.

She wasn’t happy. She was ready to go. It was time.

Her children, Christine, Jack, and Jack’s wife, Debbie, had shared her care over the past few months. They knew she was not long for this world, but I don’t think they thought it would be Monday.

Neither did I.

On Monday at 7:49 p.m, I group-texted them to say I was thinking about Aunt Nores and wondered if she was able to talk on the phone. She wasn’t.

“We’re hanging in there,” my cousin Chris texted back at 8:13. “Mom’s sleeping all the time. Pretty out of it. Not eating or drinking. Just trying to keep her comfortable.”

It was a familiar sentiment that my sisters and I felt when our parents, both under hospice care toward the end, were on their way out.

At 8:22, I texted my cousins back: “Got it. Please give her a kiss from me and tell her she was my favorite – and the coolest Guella sister.”

I added a smooch with a red heart emoji.

About an hour later, at 9:27 p.m. to be exact, my cousin Chris called.

“She’s gone.”

Even when you know it’s coming, death surprises.

The last one. Our family’s matriarch. Gone.

Luckily, Chris had already given her mother the kiss and my message. Soon after, when she had gone back to check on her, my aunt had passed.

I was reminded of my own mother who, in her last days, became restless and agitated. Hospice nurses said there are often reasons for this end of life struggle, and it was that Mom had some unfinished business.

We tried everything. My father, sisters and I were at a loss about what to do, so we called Aunt Nores. Maybe hearing her voice would ease Mom’s mind.

We held the phone to Mom’s ear and hoped that between her slow, rattling breaths, she would understand what her youngest sister was saying in their distinctive Northern Italian dialect.

“It’s OK, El. You can go now. Go see Mom and Pop, Enea and all the rest. It’s OK,” she said before hanging up with her for the last time.

My heart is breaking today, and I already miss Aunt Nores so much, especially our phone calls. Like in April, when she teased me for turning 60. “You hit another speed limit, Jin.” Or, when she told me to “Just Google it” for a recipe I needed. As if she knew what googling meant. Or when she’d get annoyed and call me her favorite term of endearment. “A**hole.”

Aunt Nores, let me say it was an honor to have been your niece. I am happy you are finally at peace. This world will be a strange place without you in it.

And you really were the coolest Guella sister.

(Main photo: The Guella sisters, circa 1928, from left: Nores, Enea and Elia.)