My Aunt Marian, by Paul Shirley

As my father and I tiptoed like hyenas into the room that had been Marian’s last, another withered old woman – one who hadn’t died days before – made an almost inaudible sound.  We ignored her, hoping to finish our macabre task quickly so we could be on our way.

But after we secured a laundry cart to help move the lift chair and 25-inch television that had accompanied Marian to the nursing home, only to outlast her there, we had to walk past the frail, muttering crone once again.

Her head on her chest like a sleeping churchgoer, she was faced away from the television that was blaring CNN’s coverage of the President’s budget proposal.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered.

I thought about what I might say:

Oh, we’re just here to gather up the two material items that had any impact on my great aunt’s final days.  She lived for 88 years, but I’ll remember her by a chair that might have enabled her to find an upright position – had she not been bedridden by kidney failure for the last two months of her life – and by a television that helped drug her brain through those same final months.

Instead, I said, “Your old roommate moved on, and we came to get her things.”

I thought it was remarkably delicate, especially for me.

We carted the chair and television down the hall, past more old women cursed by their two X chromosomes to outlive their husbands and siblings.  I thought about how sad it all was.  That a woman’s existence could be distilled to this: a bunch of near-crazy old hens, a lift chair, and a television.

My thoughts were not revelatory.  Many family members, charged with dealing with end-of-life minutiae, have had similar ones.  What came next was as predictable.  I had to figure out how to shake these images.  I had to figure out how I wanted to remember Marian.

It only took a few hours. Before lying down in a tiny twin bed at my grandmother’s house, where I would sleep before the next day’s funeral, I picked up the copy of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood I was halfway through.  The act of holding the book in my hands reminded me:

Marian Kiser helped save me from being a fool.  She helped me keep reading.

My Aunt Marian was not my aunt at all.  She was actually the first cousin of my step-grandfather.  But how was anyone going to explain to a six-year-old that the matronly woman at Thanksgiving was actually his mother’s mother’s second husband’s parents’ niece?    “Aunt” seemed to sum it up nicely.

Before she became my “aunt”, Marian was my mother’s 2^nd grade teacher.  And then, she’d been my mother’s piano teacher.  Never has “aunt” had so many qualifiers.

Eventually, she was adopted into the family, more because of the impact she’d had on it and less because of the loose genetic connection she had with it.

Marian was forever associated in my mind with books.  Not just because she read a lot – which she did – or because she appeared to have little else to do – which she didn’t.  No, I thought, Marian = books, because she was the first person to buy them for me.

My childhood was dominated by school, baseball, and the Topeka Public Library.  Like any self-respecting kid who’s only allowed to watch television on special occasions, I read a lot.  I’d hole up in my room or in the crook of a tree, and consume the Hardy Boys books and adventure stories that whisked my brain off to faraway lands. Quite simply, I loved to read.  And for that, I can’t thank Marian Kiser.  For that, I can thank my parents.

What I can thank Marian for is taking an eight-year old me to B. Dalton Booksellers and purchasing for that boy the complete Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.  When I got the multicolored books home, I devoured them.  After I finished, I marveled at the fact that I got to keep them on my shelves.  I could go back to them anytime I wanted, I thought.  Of course, I never did – there were too many other books to read.  But having that freedom was comforting.  Familiar.  Reassuring.

As I got older, I continued to read, and I continued to use libraries, of all sorts.  But eventually life changed, and I wasn’t in the same place long enough to have a library card.  And so, I went from the library user that my parents had created to the book-owner that Marian had helped train.

I read, I traveled, I collected.  Some of the books made it home with me.  Others disappeared on airplanes and in foreign apartments.  But slowly, I started to build a library of my own.  I could look at the books I’d read as they sat on shelves scattered through the houses in which I lived, considering where I’d been when I’d read them, what they’d meant to me, and which ones I might someday loan out.  I cherished the fact that I owned them.  Not because they were possessions.  Because they contained thoughts, links, and associations.

I probably would have come to appreciate owning books without Marian’s help.  I would have figured out for myself that I liked reading too much to be stymied by the lack of a public library in my life.  Or someone else would have filled the role, had Marian not been around.

But it wasn’t someone else.  The person who gave me the keys to a wealth of literature was the woman whose meager possessions I carted out of a nondescript nursing home on a blustery January evening.

The fact that I own books doesn’t guarantee that I won’t be a fool any more than having an umbrella guarantees that I won’t get wet.  But it helps.  If I could wish anything for any child I might have, it is that he or she is a reader.  Reading is the great intelligence accelerator.

Of course, it’s an accelerator that’s hard to cultivate.  Try telling a kid to read.  He’ll tell you it’s stupid and that he’d rather watch TV.  Somehow, the important people in my life managed to convince me that reading was fun, while allowing me to think that it was my idea.

Marian was one of those people.  Her contribution probably seemed minor to her at the time.  But it stands out in my brain.  Thankfully.  Because I didn’t really want to remember Marian as a sad old lady who wore wigs, was married once for nine months, and died childless and alone after a half-hearted battle with a debilitating sickness.

Instead, I can remember her as a teacher.  Not as a teacher of a concrete subject, like calculus or world history.  As a teacher of something more important: a love for books, reading, and the chance at intelligence that comes with an affection for both.