Bree Stilwell

I’m feeling all of this more acutely than in any solstice season previous. It’s astringent almost, the sensation of ancestors long dead, closer than ever in memory and in sensory availability. In particular, it’s the women in my history, known to me and entirely anonymous, that are beckoning to me.

It’s familiarity of a type, hauntingly disconcerting, and just as energizing as it is comforting… humbling.

***

I wrote the following essay just over a year ago, on October 4, 2023. I didn’t share it then but am drawn to now, for all the reasons above. I’m pulled to share in a basic way as a timely remembrance of a fascinating creature—our widowed neighbor, passed through after 93 years of a rich yet mostly anonymous life on this planet—but also as an icebreaker of sorts. On tender embrace of the season’s thinning veil, and also as foot further in the door.

This will be the first of a series, Knowledge Beyond Time, on probing for ancestral communion with the women who’ve made me.

***

Nona died in her sleep last night. 

I came home from dropping R at school to a fire truck and ambulance parked on our tiny street, and to what felt like a sudden but mild seasickness. I knew she hadn’t been in typical form, missing her over the preceding days milling about her sidewalk, picking up errant sticks, plucking undefined growing and dying things from her front flower beds, sweeping off the deck or back stoop. Seems of course just weeks ago I nervously spied as she cleaned out her gutters, on a stepladder, on a windy day. Cringing, admiring.

I called my husband, texted a common friend up the street, lit up the neighborhood watch. Moments away from the start of a client session, I just wanted her people to be aware something was happening. Remembering too that her daughter, Kelly, had knocked on our door at 12am while I was on my Ontario sabbatical the weekend prior, asking Chris for help getting Nona back into bed after she rolled out and promptly fell asleep on the floor.

Waiting for my client to log on, watching for any activity through the side window of my office—the one that faces her deck and basement walkout, always spotless, but not today. Today it was strewn with leaves, uncharacteristically loaned out to nature’s whims. I watched two fire service and one EMT walk out, slowly, speaking briefly before they both drove away. Then a text from Kelly via Chris,

Mom died in her sleep last night. I am sad but relieved she was at home. That was a tough month. She just shut down these last 4-5 days. Thank you and Bree for all you did for her and me these past years.

Whatever wind I had collected over the few early hours of the day left me at ‘Mom died…’. Not from any feeling of shock or pain, as if a bursting or what can sometimes feel like crushing weight from unexpectedly sad news, but rather something closer to sinking into warm and perfectly still water.

I was outside of the moment and into a murkier liminal space, contemplating the shadow of an object that no longer existed in the ways familiar just yesterday.

Sadness, yes, and tears, yes. I dried them and I went to my work, feeling both more connected with Nona in her death than her life, while also distracted by my emotions.

We certainly didn’t know each other well, and she preferred Chris to me, our youngest to me also. But I admired her. And I see myself in her, in ways both appealing and not. She was… and I use this word with care… feisty. She was particular. Adamant about her preferences and always maintaining her own power to choose. I’ll have to ask Kelly, but I’m fairly sure she was still driving only months ago, maybe even weeks. 

I was a little nervous around Nona. She was so confident, self-assured, steady even in the compromise of her last years. She ambled, but did so with complete authority. As if to say, ‘I’m doing this, and this is my speed and trajectory. I have no need, nor sympathy, for anything that gets in my way.’ This was not mean spirited, by the way. She was never loose with judgment or opinions.

I suppose she could be described as ‘stubborn,’ but that doesn’t quite suit the elegance of her commitment to herself. 

She invited me and Lincoln inside only once. Into ‘The Swan Lady’s’ house. I’m not sure what I expected, but it surprisingly didn’t involve an uncomfortable number of swans. There may have been a few, but more obvious, completely clear at first glance, was Nona’s extreme fastidiousness. Consistent with her era, that of The Greatest Generation, every surface was spotless, every shelf utilized sparingly and with care, every piece of furniture designed not for lounging but for the encouragement of an alert and respectful posture.

She invited us in because she had a bureau she wanted hauled out to the curb, free for the neighborhood taking, but first wanted a second opinion on it’s street-side value. She didn’t want to go to the trouble of muscling it out there (originally intending, yes, by her own muscle) and having it not find any interested eyeballs. I remember being outside with L, maybe doing some light yard work of our own, and hearing her usual address to me, in lieu of remembering my name… ‘yoo hoooo!’ … in a way both assertive and completely adorable. 

There was no wondering what Nona needed or wanted from you, because if it ever actually happened, which for me was this exact one time, she came at you like a guided missile. Not only was it impossible to reject her directness, but by the time you were making sense of what she was asking of you, she was already ten steps ahead.

She identified, ensnared, and was herself already apace at the actual thing before one had any grip on what was happening.

It felt a little like being caught in a human-to-human tractor beam, frozen as cargo to be utilized at the whim of the captor. While also as if one didn’t mind at all and was quite happy to be entirely trapped in such a fashion.

I’m still unclear who was more cautious on entering, him or me. I felt huge and conspicuous in this tiny old lady’s tiny old home. Also, I was ravenously curious, and trying to contain the obvious sweep of my eyeballs just made me feel more obvious and intrusive. Thankfully, and graciously in a way, she was already talking furniture details, pulling my focus to a single corner of the room, and back to her point. 

It was a huge thing, and there was absolutely zero way I was going to let her try and move it an inch, let alone the hundreds of feet to the curb. We talked briefly about listing it on Nextdoor, which I said I’d be happy to manage, though she insisted she’d not take a dime for it. Almost as quickly as she catapulted us into her living room, she was asking L if he liked… swans, I think as her opening salvo. But then, ice skating, which without waiting for an answer, prompted her to pull an album from the shelf and quickly (WAY too quickly for my hyper-excited curiosity) flipping through photographs of very young women in modest figure skating garb.

She closed it about as quickly as she opened it, and I tried not to look as devastated as I felt. Nona was very private with me, holding the keys to her history, goings-on, life, as close to the vest as one can, though while being pretty easy with my husband. She preferred the fellas, and I can hardly blame her. I imagine myself, in so many years, feeling just as particular about the type of energy I want around me, let alone the brand of nurturing. A man’s attentions are undeniably different than a woman’s, and she still enjoyed a classically masculine style of admiration.

I’m not sure how we left her that day, but I recall it being quick and highly efficient, and leaving me with infinitely more questions. I felt myself nearly angry with her, for teasing me with exactly five pages of a photo album, one ridiculously brief, nugget of a story about her love of figure skating, and zero time with which to imprint some level of Nona context into my brain.

What I didn’t at all anticipate that day was how present she would remain in my life, but only beyond her death.

How, in the dissipation of her spirit, her wisdom is somehow more available to me now than it was when her personality was her gatekeeper.

She lives on through my relationship with her swans, my interactions with the home she made and kept, with the path she wore from doorstep to mailbox, every footfall a singular purpose. With the energy that she still manipulates, the air that holds her and that I in turn breathe.

I felt starved for information in her physical presence, but now infinitely abundant with it in her absence.