Aunt Sue’s 15 Minutes of Fame

After someone dies, there’s usually crying, some whispering, some hugging, a little time to grieve. This didn’t happen for my family when my Aunt Sue passed..in fact, far from it.

Instead, after she passed, a man and his sister were whisked away to their car, 9-1-1 was called when the five people left behind determined she was deceased and unable to be resuscitated. Her husband waited at my mother’s house for word of her passing and the media descended on the house like locusts. My mom had told me things would get too crazy for anyone to call me after my aunt had passed. I depended on those locusts to let me know when she was gone via the radio at work (which was 2500 miles away).

There would be more to come...sound bites of my family splashed across the world as they participated in a group counseling session, a four page article in Time magazine that gave great insight into the various struggles that had occurred prior to Aunt Sue’s passing, people wrote letters to editors and picketed the funeral. My mother, her closest sister, was hounded by the press and labeled a heartless woman.
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Aunt Sue, nearly blind, crippled with MS, always suffering with various skin conditions, a former Avon lady and wife of a bowling alley manager was suddenly famous. Not because of how she lived but because of how she died!
She picked the day of her death, the people that would surround her while she passed into “purgatory” (the place Catholics go that don’t deserve heaven or hell) and even the sheets on her bed. She died quietly after saying tearful goodbyes to her four sisters and son.

However, on that day, it was the people she said thank you to that made her famous. She had requested their presence at her deathbed. As a result, she had been required to participate in several meetings and family counseling sessions to ensure these guests would still be welcome on the day of her passing.
Dr. Jack Kevorkian, (aka Dr. Death) and his sister, Margaret Janus, were her honored guests that day.