[miami_fan]

*Long Rambling Post Alert*

My great aunt passed away at 99 years old. I know we sometimes talk about not wanting to live to that age but she lived and enjoyed every one of those years right up until the beginning of February when she had a stroke. She survived that and within a week or so wanted and then demanded to go home. They would not allow her to go home because she was still frail and in pain and lived by herself so she ended up going to my uncle's house. She was alive for another four days or so and then passed away peacefully in her sleep on February 12. Over the next two plus weeks, our family went back to our ancestral home and sent our matriarch home.

I have never experienced a death of a loved one where there was no stress, no sadness, no thought of what could of or should have been. That is what happened with my aunt's death. The only disappointment was I wish she could have made to April 5th for he 100th birthday party. But even that feels silly, she lived for 99 years! She traveled to every continent multiple times. Other than a year she lived at a relative for her first job, she lived in the same house her parents bought before she was born. She never married, had no kids but her house was always filled with family, friends, former teaching and administrative colleagues and former students. She enjoyed four generations of family after hers. And who the hell has former students come to have lunch with them every year and they handle everything including making sure to clean up everything before they left her house 20+ years after she retired. To say that she lived a life well lived is an understatement.

She planned and paid for every detail of her funeral. Every reading, every hymn, every speaker, every musician, if it happened at the funeral she had planned it. She told the family what she wanted to wear while in the coffin and during her cremation. She made sure this was going to be a celebration of life. Rule# 1- There will be one eulogy, the minister will give his sermon and that was it. No tributes or anything like. We could and did set up a separate service for that. The rest of the funeral was nothing but hymns hymns and more hymns. It was wonderful. I have never given serious thought to what my funeral would look like but having gone through funerals with what felt like a never ending conveyor belt of people giving their well meaning and understandably sad tributes to the deceased, I now know I don't want that. Save the tributes for another day. I hate the idea of family and friends being sad even it is because I passed. I want them to feel what I and everyone else felt after my aunt's passing. But I wonder if that can only be the case if the person lives to 99 and squeezed every drop of life out of each of those years.

Now a week or so after returning home, I am finally coming to grip with reality. My great aunt was the last of my maternal grandparents' generation. There is only one left in that generation on my paternal grandparents' side. My parents' generation are now the elders in the family for intents and purpose. They are now the closest links to the good ol' days. That also means all of a sudden, I have moved up on the family tree. I was definitely aware that my parents were getting older but now with the exception of my great aunt on my Dad's side, my parents' generation are the oldest living one in the family. And then it is mine. Damn, life comes at you fast.