Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

Yesterday, September 24, 2025, my last aunt passed away. I only had three to start with and the last one living, my dad’s baby sister, died yesterday at the age of 88. She was seven years younger than my dad, and she grew up in my hometown. She graduated from high school the year I was born. She soon married and moved away with her husband who worked for an oil and gas company.

My dad died in 2015, just months from his 85th birthday, and it was a huge blow, having lost my mom in 2007. She was only 74 but had been in poor health for some time. Then it was just the three of us, me and my two brothers, both younger than me.

My dad’s older sister, who was seven years older than my dad, died in 2012 at the age of 89. She, my dad, and his baby sister were born to my grandfather’s second wife. His first wife died, leaving him with three children, all much older than the children of his second wife, my grandmother. I never knew my grandfather, and my grandmother died when I was six years old. My dad’s half siblings have all gone as well.

My mom only had one surviving sibling, her brother passed away when he was a toddler. My maternal grandparents then had my mom’s older sister and my mom. My grandparents died very young. My grandmother died at the age of 48 when my mom was only 19. My grandfather, bereft after his wife’s death, died only seven months later at the age of 57. My mom was 20 years old. My mom’s sister died in 2018 at the age of 87, having lived a full life. She graciously and generously gave my mother a kidney in 1995, which extended my mom’s life for 12 years.

Today, I am sad. I’m sad because my last aunt has died. Her family is in Louisiana, and I am in Maryland. Her children have scheduled the funeral for tomorrow, Friday, September 26, making it impossible for me to get home in time. I am sad that I won’t be there, with my two brothers and my cousins, to say goodbye to my last aunt. I am sad that I won’t ever taste her pecan pie or her fried potatoes again. Even her obituary commented what a great cook she was. What a great sense of humor she had. How she and my dad would spar and tease each other.

I am sad because after my first cousin, I am the oldest person alive in my family, both on my mom’s side and on my dad’s side. Is this what getting old feels like? I don’t feel old, but there are so many funerals, many I attend here in Maryland–church friends and relatives of my daughters’ friends, and some that I can attend in Louisiana if given enough time to fly home, and some, like this one, I just can’t get to. My dear father-in-law passed away during the pandemic. He didn’t die of covid, but because of covid, his funeral was limited in size. Not comfortable flying yet as we weren’t old enough to receive the vaccine yet, my husband drove alone all the way to Louisiana. I didn’t get to say goodbye in person.

Reading has given me so much pleasure my entire life. Sometimes it takes me far away to distant lands, sometimes it grounds me and brings me closer to home. Sometimes poetry will grab hold of me in unexpected ways. Today as I was thinking about all the losses in my family, thinking about the family reunion that is taking place in heaven with my dad and his two sisters, reunited with their parents and their half-siblings, I was thinking about this Robert Frost poem. In our material world, gold is highly valued. Some work hard all their life to accumulate as much gold as they can, and they sometimes forget that they can’t take that with them. But, as evidenced by Frost’s very short poem, gold can mean more than just precious metal. It can be precious loved ones who leave us. For every season there is a time. Nothing gold can stay.

Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower; 
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.