The last time I saw my Aunt Debbie in person was January 31, 2018. That feels like another life now—a version of myself I barely recognize and a world where she was still just a call or a drive away. Time, like yarn pulled through fingers, stretches between us. What once felt like distance now feels like absence, and absence has a weight all its own.
Aunt Debbie passed away this week. The details of her passing are distant from me, not just in miles, but in the quiet detachment that comes when lives drift apart. We hadn’t spoken in a while—not because of anger, but because of time, of life, of space. “Life separates people,” as James Salter once wrote, “but death reveals how close they really were.”
She was my father’s sister, a self-described preacher and farmer’s wife, grounded in scripture and seasoned by the land. I remember, growing up, she’d send me Christian-themed journals and Bible studies for birthdays and Christmases. They often went unread, set aside with polite appreciation but little understanding. I wasn’t ready then—not for the kind of reflection she was nudging me toward, not for the conversations she perhaps hoped we’d one day have.
But now, as I surround myself with shelves of books, I wonder if she saw something in me back then. Not the faith, perhaps, but the need to write. To explore. To reflect. To bear witness to an inner world. She may have hoped I’d become a disciple. I became a diarist. Both, in their way, are forms of devotion.
How strange it is, the complicated ways we come to know our family. So often, the people who shaped us remain mysteries, known only in fragments and flashes. Photos help. I’ve been revisiting my favorite images of her—two, in particular, from her own wedding day, long before I was born. In one, she’s young and rebellious, lifting her dress to show her garter with a smile that is all mischief and joy. In the other, she’s walking down the aisle on the arm of my grandfather, also gone now, both of them radiant with the quiet courage it takes to believe in new beginnings.
I didn’t know that version of her, not really. But I’m glad she existed. That photo—her smile, his pride—feels like a secret the past kept just long enough to show me now. It reminds me that our elders are not just our elders. They were young once, unsure and excited, building lives and families that would one day include us. And now that they’re gone, we’re left with memories and photographs, which are sometimes the same thing.
But what I’ll remember most is her hands.
Aunt Debbie crocheted. Pot holders. Dusters. Door stops shaped like dolls. A poncho for me. And for my wedding, a blanket. Browns, creams, soft blues—the colors of the earth and sky. Not a flashy gift, but a faithful one. Each stitch a quiet promise: that she loved me in the way she knew how. That she wanted to give warmth, protection, comfort. In her hands, yarn became presence.
Grief has a way of collapsing time. It renders the old grievances irrelevant. It silences the distances we once thought so wide. I saw my grandmother cry this week, her strength leave her hands as the sorrow settled in. I saw in her not just the loss of a daughter but the unraveling of time itself—a mother burying a child, even in old age, is still a mother caught in a primal ache. None of the history matters in that moment. None of the slow drift. Distance no longer has the power to diminish.
As philosopher Hannah Arendt once observed, “The essence of humanity is that we can be addressed and that we can answer.” My Aunt Debbie addressed me through the things she made and gave, even when I wasn’t sure how to respond. And now, years later, I find I am still answering her in the pages I write, in the memories I hold, in the blanket I keep folded by the couch.
Family is complicated. Love, too. And time plays tricks on us, making us believe we have more of it, that the people we don’t reach for now will still be there when we do. But space—emotional, physical, digital—grows wide in quiet ways. And yet, when death arrives, it erases the map. All that’s left is what we carried from each other.
For Aunt Debbie, what remains is warmth. Yarn looped into a lasting presence. Journal pages lined with the echo of her early gifts. Photographs that tell stories she never had to explain. And a memory—imperfect, distant, but still stitched into me.
She is gone. But the things she gave me, even the ones I didn’t understand at the time, have shaped who I’ve become.
And that, in the end, is a kind of grace.
Rest in peace, Deborah.