My Aunt Diney was beautiful. In the conventional ways, yes, she was certainly a beauty. We all thought so. But she was also so deeply beautiful in the important ways. In the way she read. In the way she thought. In the way she remembered. In the way she loved. Hers wasn’t always the largest and loudest love in the room – no, her love warmed like embers. Quiet, subtle, yet so deeply burning to her core. The way she would spend hours or days researching and planning a single, simple moment of generosity, one so quickly and humbly offered it could easily be swept along the moving current of a conversation without demanding even a breath of time for you to really understand what she had given. The way she gave of herself like water flowing through open fingers, her jewelry, her cooking, her ideas, her time – often leaving herself near empty and yet never hesitating to then give just a little more.
She gave me one of the most important gifts of my life. She taught me to read – and, perhaps more importantly, she taught me to love to read. What power she gave me, what empathy, creativity, joy, maturity, wisdom she gave me. If you know me, you’ll know how my love of words has shaped my entire life. I don’t know who I would be today without the hours, days, months, years of steady, focused, glowing love she gave me.
That kind of love is familiar to all of us. It is the love of the man who washed the feet of the friends who walked beside Him, the man who knows the names and hearts of strangers on the road, the man who wept with grief before the grave of Lazarus – even though yes, He knew, just as we do, that a grave is not an end. It is the same love that moves with quiet grace to comfort us in darkness and light our path in moments of doubt. It is the love that painted our whole world in bursting color, which promised us a rainbow after the challenge of rain.
I think about the way Jesus moved through the world with his profound and perfect empathy, and I think of her. I believe that she knew God in a humble and sacred way because she saw and loved so many things through His eyes. She was able to extend her heart more widely than any of us will ever comprehend. Her research into the history of our family was not a stoic act of inventory for her – it was empathy. It was love. She saw the story of our ancestors arriving in a colony of a new and completely unfamiliar world – and not in an abstract way, she knew their names, she knew their trades, their secrets, their pasts, their futures. She saw the wild sky and the dust and the thundering cattle of the ranchers in our family tree. She felt their stories. She held space for them, for all that each one went through in the cascading series of events that led our family here, to these names, to this place, to this day.
And that love, that empathy, wasn’t reserved for her findings on ancestry.com. She saw us. She remembered in vivid detail pieces of ourselves, our stories, in ways that showed us how closely she was paying attention. She could pull the tiniest memory of a haircut, a drawing, a sweater, an essay, and, holding it in her palm, she’d show it to you as if to say, “See? I saw you then. I loved you then.” She wrote (in perfect penmanship) the month and year on every card she gave because capturing memory was so important to her.
So let us, in turn, remember her. Let us remember the graceful, quirky, beautiful details of her. The way her smile twinkled ever so slightly it made you feel like you were sharing an inside joke, just the two of you. The way she would so extensively research a place that your list of things you absolutely must do and must see made your itinerary begin to bulge in all directions with so many wonders. The way she would mutter something so quick-witted and hilarious under her breath at dinner you could barely remember to cover your mouth before bursting into laughter. The way she was so, so brave in the end. And let us continue to see her, to let those little details that float by remind us of moments with her – the first bite of a homemade birthday cake, the feel of a warm mug of echinacea tea with manuka honey (“It’s soo good for you Marina…”), the way a voice sweetly inflects when talking to a pet who tilts an ear in response, the faintest smell of worn books and cigarettes found pressed in the folds of a cardigan. Let us look at the tiny, beautiful intricacies of this world, this life, we were given, and let us love and see and hold and share every moment of it. I know she did.
With love, Marina Horiates Kerekes
